The chef Jiro Ono has delivered a grim warning. (Yes, that Jiro—the eponymous sushi guru in the hit 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi.) “I told my young men three years ago sushi materials will totally change in five years,” he said, quoted in the New York Daily News. “And now, such a trend is becoming a reality little by little.” Ono owns Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seater in downtown Tokyo that boasts three Michelin stars and is reputed to be the world’s best sushi restaurant. (The base price for a 20-piece set sushi meal is ¥30,000, about $262.) Of special concern is tuna, said the 89-year-old Ono in a recent talk with his eldest son, Yoshikazu, at Japan’s Foreign Correspondents Club. And in particular, bluefin tuna—whose fatty belly meat turns up on fancy sushi menus as toro. That’s the species so prized that a prime specimen sold for $1.8 million in Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market in 2013. The scarcity of high-quality Pacific bluefin tuna has left Japanese fishmongers sourcing from the Atlantic.

Even as Japan’s fishing fleet lands less than its quota for lower-quality tuna stocks, it consistently catches its entire quota of precious Atlantic bluefin.sushi to go frankfurt “I can’t imagine at all that sushi in the future will be made of the same materials we use today,” the elder Ono said. sushi north york don millsHis son adds that sushi’s growing popularity worldwide had led to a surge in demand for bluefin tuna, leaving Japan’s sushi-makers increasingly dependent on farmed tuna.cooked sushi rice calories Atlantic bluefin stocks are indeed in peril. sushi conveyor belt new york

That’s partly because regulators have allowed fleets to catch too many tuna for the species to rebuild its stocks. The western bluefin population is now less than half of what it was in 1970 (and the population had already been heavily fished for decades at that point). juegos online sushi barOn the other side, in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea, after hitting a historic low in 2010, the bluefin population are now thought to be on the way to recovery, according to the latest estimate. jiro dreams of sushi is he still aliveThat’s likely due to the fact that since 2007, when a rebuilding plan began, the regulator has reduced the allowable limit by 82%; jiro dreams of sushi watch now

it slashed the western Atlantic catch limit by only 37%. Another big factor, however, is rampant illegal bluefin fishing. The high prices bluefin fetch encourage fishermen to catch more than their countries are reporting, making it easy to overestimate stock size. Worse, blackmarket tuna fishermen often catch juvenile fish, making it even harder for the species to recover. And it’s not just tuna populations that are suffering. As Yoshikazu Ono notes, slow-maturing shellfish such as abalone and ark shell are also being harvested so fast their stocks are shrinking. “They catch them all together (before some are ready),” he says, “pushing the stock to deplete.”When it comes to sushi, you either love it or you don’t. Sure it’s an acquired taste, but at least we all know what sushi is. Well apparently this Chinese student didn’t, and when she and her friends visited a rather famous sushi house while studying in Japan, she ended up pissing off the owners and went online to rant on Weibo (the Chinese Facebook) to bad mouth the sushi masters thinking that her friends would back her up.

Instead, she was met with a backlash of public shame and many called her a disgrace to her country. If this story doesn’t make your Monday just a little more tolerable, it’ll at least put you in the mood for sushi. Chinese student Chuhan Lin was studying in Japan when she and four friends decided to try sushi at a branch of the famous Sukiyabashi Jiro restaurant in Roppongi, Japan, made famous from the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The restaurant was managed by one of Jiro’s sons and is known the world over for pretty much the best sushi ever. To eat at this restaurant, you have to make a reservation and pick what you eat before you get there so that they make sure they prepare all the items you order as fresh as possible. Well Lin and her four friends, all Chinese students, showed up 40 minutes late and never even apologized. In the restaurant they have a common locker where patrons can store all their things while they eat. One of Lin’s friends wanted to get her wallet from the locker, but didn’t bother to ask the staff to assist her like any normal person would.

When someone did find her trying to break in to the communal locker, she was told off, and we are sure the language barrier didn’t help much either. It turned out that two of Lin’s friends didn’t actually even like raw fish. Why the hell would they go to sushi then, right? Her two friends ended up bailing to eat deep-fried pork somewhere else down the street- how classy. With only three friends left and a pre-ordered meal waiting for them, they cancelled everything and asked the sushi chef to just cook all the raw fish and package it- to go. That was strike three. The sushi master, probably pissed at these unappreciative kids, asked, “Is sushi served cooked in your country? If you can’t handle raw food, you should have informed us when you made the reservation!” So Lin replied, “Who knew!? I didn’t make the reservation!” In her post, she ranted about their poor treatment saying, “If we were Abe! If we were Obama! Would he dare to show such an attitude?”