Origins of Sushi and How They Evolved Throughout the Years

In today’s day and age food has become a major topic when it comes to trends and social media. Social media models travel the world and explore new cuisines and post them on their social media accounts. That influences the rest of modern society to jump on board and experiment with new foods and cuisines in order to keep the trends going. People are not just feeding but dining on these cuisines. And that’s exactly how sushi came to be a global cuisine. Social media has become the source that determines our modern day society’s identity, and the one that creates cultural rituals. Our social identity is the qualities, beliefs, looks, expressions, and personality that make groups who they are. Food is part of our identity, part of our nation’s culture.

Culture is the symbols, language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and even material objects that are shared and passed from one generation to the next. Food and cuisine are both vectors of culture and therefore promote and maintain these values, images, and ideas. Food is culture because the way we farm, shop, cook, and eat promote these cultural images and ideas. Just as Ronald Barthe said, “Food is not only a collection of products that can be used for statistical or nutritional studies. It is also at the same time, a system of communication, protocol of usages, situations and behaviors.”

Global foods are those cuisines that have a cultural origin and are a part of a nation’s identity, but throughout history have spread and become popular throughout the entire world. The world is becoming progressively more interconnected when it comes to the food industry. People can now produce and consume the same things from all different parts of the world. People from one nation can now eat another nation’s cuisine. That is how sushi came to be in the United States and the rest of the world. Cuisine is a term used to analyze food culture. Farm and Armelagos suggested that every nation’s cuisine has four elements: basic core foods, distinct cooking techniques, distinct flavoring, food manners/etiquette, and a food chain.

The basic core ingredients for sushi include the steamed rice and fresh fish. The cooking method used was fermentation and/or the hand-made rolls. For flavoring the sushi chef used vinegar and salt to ferment the sushi. But in modern day society people use soy sauce, pickled ginger, spicy mayo, and eel sauce to give the cuisine some additional flavoring. Today sushi is eaten using chopsticks. Back in the day sushi would be made using local fish and rice from Japan, but now that it has expanded most fish are imported and the rice is packaged.

Just like many other ancient foods, sushi has a legend behind it. In an old Japanese wives’ tale, an old woman hid her pots of rice in osprey nest because she was afraid that thieves were going to steal them. Days later, when she checked on her rice pots she realized that the rice was fermenting and had mixed in with some osprey to make a delicious new mixture. Later she learned that the rice also served to preserve the fish and extend its shelf life. That story is captivating, but not entirely truly. The earliest written record of sushi is in a 4th century Chinese dictionary that mentions salted fish placed on cooked rice and causing fermentation. This idea of using fermented rice as a fish preservative began in South East Asia several centuries ago. When the rice begins to ferment a lactic acid called bacilli begins to produce. This acid and the salt in fish start a reaction that slows down the growth of bacteria on fish. This process is referred to as picking, and some sushi restaurants today are even called a “tsuke-ba” or a “pickling place”. It is believed that sushi became known in Japan in the ninth century as Buddhism started spreading.

The Buddhist diet abstained from all meats, so many Japanese people resorted to a pescatarian diet. And most of the time the fish was combined with fermented rice because it preserved the fish for longer. This combination was called “nare-zushi” or “aged sushi”. The earliest type of nare-zushi was funa-zushi, Golden carp, more than 1,000 years ago near Lake Biwa, Japan. The Golden carp and salted rice were packed in and compacted under weights to speed up the process of fermentation. This method took at least half a year to complete fermentation. Therefore, from the ninth to the fourteenth century this cuisine was only available to the wealthy upper class in Japan. Later on, in the fifteenth century when Japan was in the middle of a civil war they developed a quicker method of fermentation that took only a month to complete, by adding more weight. The new sushi created was called mama-nare zushi or raw nare-zushi.

In 1606, Tokugawa Ieyasu, a Japanese dictator, moved the Japanese capital from Kyoto to Edo. This brought on a dramatic transformation with the help of the merchant class, and the city turned into the hub of Japanese night life and entertainment. In Edo the sushi chefs used a fermentation processes developed in the 1700s which called for starting with a layer of cooked rice seasoned with rice vinegar and then placing a layer of fish on top. This combo was then placed in a small wooden box for two hours and compressed, and later sliced into thin pieces. This allowed for the sushi process to become much faster and efficient. In the 1820s there was man called Hanaya Yohei who opened the first sushi stall in Ryogoku, Edo. He chose the location because it was near a bridge that connected Edo to the next town and would bring in more customers. Yohei used more modern fermentation processes to get the sushi done faster. He would start by adding vinegar and salt to the freshly steamed rice and let it sit for a couple of minutes. He then would top a small ball of rice with a fresh piece of fish from the bay. Since the fish was fresh he did not need to preserve or ferment it.

This method allowed for sushi to become “fast food”. Many people took a liking and started expecting nigiri as their sushi. By the 1900s, Edo had grown immensely and had become one of the biggest cities in the world due to the size of land and its population. By the 1920s there were hundreds of sushi carts around Edo, which is now known as the city of Tokyo. After the Great Kanto Earthquake, the price of land in Tokyo plummeted and these sushi vendors were able to buy land to build sushi restaurants. By 1950s, sushi was only served indoors. Technology had major advances and by 1970s refrigerators were now able to keep fish fresh and this allowed for fish to be shipped fresh over long distances which increased the demand in sushi all over Japan. Now sushi restaurants opened all over Japan and their suppliers and distributors’ networks grew and allowed for the expansion of sushi all over the world.

Sushi first arrived in Los Angeles in 1966, when a man named Noritoshi Kanai and his partner Harry Wolff, a sushi restaurant in Little Tokyo, named Kawafuku. They started catering to Japanese business men and these businessmen liked it so much that they started bringing their American colleagues. A couple of years later, in 1970 the first sushi bar in Hollywood opened. This sushi bar was called Osho and catered to celebrities which gave sushi the final push it needed to succeed in America.

The creation of the California sushi roll allowed for sushi to succeed and progress because crab and avocado were more palatable for Americans rather than immediately jumping into raw fish. Soon after, New York and Chicago, other major diverse and trendsetter cities caught on to this new movement and opened up sushi restaurants of their own. This allowed for the dish to migrate across the country.

Sushi was a very practical cuisine for the country of Japan. Japan’s geography is made for agriculture and seafood farming. The seas are filled with an abundant variety of seafood and the rest of the land and mountains are carefully cultivated for rice and other kinds of crops. This cuisine is very authentic and pure because it all draws from ingredients from the nature and land in Japan. Most major cuisines in the world tend to have more complicated processes to create new taste and dishes that don’t exist naturally, but this Japanese cuisine strives to keep the natural taste of its ingredients. Sushi is an evolving cuisine.

Modern day sushi chefs have introduced new ingredients, new creative additions and toppings, and new preparation and serving methods. The modernization of technology and refrigeration allowed for the expansion of sushi throughout the world, and now it is not only a national cuisine, but a global food. This speaks about the identity of our modern day nation and the idea of the new acceptance of diversity.