SUSHI IS A SCAM

"I've Never Heard of a Poison Pork Chop!"

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Homer: Okay, okay, okay, okay, where do YOU wanna go?

Lisa: Anywhere but hamburgers, pizza, or fried chicken.

Homer: Fine, we’ll go to Mars!

Marge: Hmm, there is that new sushi restaurant on elm street.

Bart: Sushi? Hey, maybe this is just one of those things you hear on the playground, but… isn’t that raw fish!?

Lisa: As usual, the playground has the facts right but missed the point entirely—sushi is considered quite the delicacy.

- “The Simpsons”¹

[Author’s Note: This article is Part II of a two-part series of marketing scams in food and drinks. This was initially written as part of the Chapter in Herd Immunity: Societal Deprogramming about understanding the basics of Marketing, Psychology, and Influence.]

After I graduated high school, I visited my dad and his side of the family in Maryland. For those that don’t know, eating crabs (not that kind) is ubiquitous in Maryland, mainly due to the Chesapeake Bay area and the copious amount of fishing and crabbing. So my extended family had a crab party (not that kind) where they bought fresh crab, invited the family over, dumped them out on the table, and everyone ate them. If you are not from this part of the country, it is worth attending, whether you eat shellfish or not, to see people going to town on these crustaceans. Frankly, the whole event made me sick. Whether or not I’m genuinely allergic to shellfish, I have no desire to eat it again. Sushi (and most fish dishes) as a whole is a scam. I can’t find it anywhere, but there’s an episode of The King of Queens where Doug Heffernan (played by Kevin James) says something like, “Raw fish, not as good as cooked cow!” I know some people have seen Jiro Dreams of Sushi and over-romanticize the art of sushi. There are a few artisans in the world who work exclusively in the medium of raw fish. However, those people are the outlier, not the rule.

Before he went on The Joe Rogan Experience and made a complete buffoon out of himself, Adam Conover did a great episode of Adam Ruins Everything about fish and sushi. The episode discusses that because humans are overfishing the oceans, many restaurants are now forced to pass off low-quality fish that people wouldn’t normally eat, re-branding it clever names such as ‘Chilean Sea Bass or ‘Orange Roughy.’² Would you eat a $20 plate of ‘Orange Roughy’ if it were called what it is: deep sea perch or slimehead?³ Strike up another blow to marketing. You’re telling yourself a story when you overpay for oily, cold-water fish: “I didn’t do the research.”

Also, people often think they’re eating tuna or salmon, but they’re eating an amalgamation of cheap fish that could make them incredibly sick. In sushi restaurants alone, 74% of the “tuna” people thought they were eating wasn’t tuna at all.⁴ This isn’t just sushi, as mentioned above. As Dr. Robert Lustig wrote in his 2021 book Metabolical:

It’s estimated that 20 percent of the seafood sold is mislabeled, and the records show that 1.7 lawsuits per week are filed in the Northern District of California for some form of food fraud.

Still think your food is what you thought it was? OK, here’s your reality check—is the farmed salmon really pink, or is it the food dye astaxanthin?… Is your sushi really the fish advertised on the menu or some other species that you’ve never heard of?⁵

This reminds me of The Simpsons episode at the top of the page, entitled One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish, where the Simpsons drag Homer to a sushi restaurant against his wishes. To his surprise, Homer learns he loves sushi and orders at least one of everything on the menu. In his newfound zeal, he orders fugu or blowfish and ingests poison. As Homer sits in Dr. Hibbert’s office waiting for his test results, he laments, “Try something new, Homer! What’ll it hurt you, Homer!? I never heard of a poison pork chop!”⁶

Food fraud also takes place when restaurants and eateries are forced to substitute products due to outages or to juice their profit margins. I cite Lustig again:

It’s common for restaurants or food stands to substitute something of lesser value in an attempt to reap a higher profit…Another common substitution occurs in fish sales, where one study demonstrated that 21 percent of the fish underwent substitution, and that one out of every three establishments visited sold substituted seafood. Fish substitution is more likely to occur in restaurants (26 percent) than at grocery stores (12 percent). A common substitution occurs when tilapia (containing red dye), which costs $3.51 per pound, is swapped out for snapper, which costs about $15 per pound. Of the species tested, sea bass and snapper had the highest rates of mislabeling (55 percent and 42 percent, respectively). Much of the substituted seafood is labeled as a local favorite, while the truth is it may have been flown from halfway around the world.⁷

So, even if the fish and fisherman are on the up-and-up, the restauranteurs and food suppliers could be pulling the wool over your eyes.

In the modern world, with the over-farming of fish, the poor diet of fish, and the disgusting premise of eating bottom-feeders and low-quality fish, I’ll pass. I always wondered why people liked crabs, lobster, and shrimp because they are unclean animals that eat trash. I’m a hypocrite, though, because I enjoy bacon, sausages, and pork chops from time to time. Yes, fowl and bovine are mass-produced and eat a trash diet. I’m aware.  However, I’ll double-pass, adding the potential of getting mercury poisoning or red tide poisoning with some of these fish breeds.⁸ Over-paying for fish that will probably give you food poisoning, mercury, or red tide poisoning isn’t worth it.⁹ Perhaps if only the best quality fish is used. Or in a world where we only had a couple of billion people instead of eight billion. Perhaps it would be excellent and affordable to the typical person. Then I would concede that sushi is not a scam. You guys keep overpaying for “fresh fish.” I’ll be over here with my tacos, steaks, and fried rice.

Poké bowls are also a scam. Poké is a Hawaiian dish that combines sushi and a “burrito” bowl with raw fish instead of real protein. In my estimation, sushi and Poké are the food equivalent of seltzer drinks: you’re paying for marketing, not quality or quantity. A brand-new sushi restaurant in my area has wait times as high as two hours. Not only are people surrendering hours of their lives to eat overpriced fish, but they do so willingly because of another gimmick: a revolving sushi bar. You sit at a conveyor belt, and you pay for the privilege of chasing sushi down a belt, fiddling with the plastic lid to get the “tasty treat” inside. As a student of marketing, it’s a brilliant way to get people to pay for the opportunity to starve to death. If I were genuinely Machiavellian, I’d apply for a job there, glue down all the lids after the sushi is inside, and watch people struggle for two hours to open them before finally demanding their money back and leaving. But I’m an asshole. Ironically enough, this sushi restaurant is two doors down… from a Poké restaurant. I can’t make this stuff up!

I understand these anti-fish statements are a bit heavy-handed from a “farang” or a “gaijin” with aspirations of living in Asia. However, I’d rather eat fowl, beef, and lamb over fish. I understand that many Asian dishes, particularly fried rice, use fish sauce and seafood sauce. I treat this like eggs in baked goods: as long as I can’t taste them, are they there? If I spend $20 on a plate of protein, I want to know if it came from an animal I can easily recognize. Give me the rare cow steak over the rare “tuna” steak. To quote Kevin James’ character on The King of Queens: “Raw fish, not as good as cooked cow.”¹⁰

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Archived Post Notice:
This article is preserved here for archival purposes only.
The updated and permanent version now lives at:
https://realityunveiled.com/sushi-is-a-scam/
Visit the site for the full archive and new essays.

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1. The Simpsons. 1991. Episode 7F11. “One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish.” Directed by Wesley M Archer. Written by Nell Scovell. Aired January 24, 1991, on Fox. 20th Century Fox. DVD, disc 2.

2. TruTV. 2015. “Adam Ruins Everything – The Awful Truth About Salmon and Tuna,” October 26, 2015. Accessed July 21, 2021. YouTube. Video, 2:37. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MmWCHFq0BA

3. Wikipedia. 2021. “Wikipedia: Orange Roughy.” Wikimedia Foundation. Last modified July 19, 2021, 17:15. Accessed July 22, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_roughy

4. TruTV, “Adam Ruins Everything – The Awful Truth About Salmon and Tuna,”

5. Lustig, Robert H., MD, MSL. 2021. Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Science. New York: Harper Wave, 277-8.

6. The Simpsons, “One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish.”

7. Lustig, Metabolical, 288-9.

8. Wood, Stacey. 2016. “Mercury Poisoning: Causes, Effects & Fish.” Live Science. February 24, 2016. Accessed July 20, 2021. https://www.livescience.com/53837-mercury-poisoning.html

9. Vermes, Krystle, Ph.D. 2019. “What Causes a Red Tide and Is It Harmful To Humans? Healthline. Med. Rev. Alana Biggers, M.D., MPH. October 12, 2019. Accessed July 21, 2021. https://www.healthline.com/health/is- red-tide-harmful-to-humans

10. The King of Queens. 2002. “Business Affairs.” Directed by Rob Schiller. Written by Cathy Yuspa & Josh Goldsmith. Aired October 28, 2002, on CBS. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. DVD, disc 1.