“After ten years they let you cook the eggs…” That line was from Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Think of this film as a learning by doing model.  Bosses would like to invest in training workers, but they fear the workers will leave them high and dry, unable to recoup their investments.  Bosses therefore train workers excessively slowly, keeping them as apprentices in the meantime.  Only in the end stages of training do the workers learn how to handle the high-margin items, namely the sushi itself.  Furthermore Japanese customers demand high quality, which make it difficult for an incompletely trained worker to open his own sushi bar.  As long as there are many very good sushi bars, this equilibrium with well-informed customers can persist and sustain long-term worker training.  Quality is inefficiently high, and productivity in the service sector is inefficiently low, while personal service quality is inefficiently high (let him greet and bow to customers before he learns how to shape the rice), but training occurs and the elderly retain lots of social and economic bargaining power.

Young workers earn not so much, but can cash in on equity (i.e., open their own sushi bar) later in their lives.  They are not promising marriage prospects for young women. Imagine a shock which limits the future profitability of sushi bars, such as fish depletion or greater competition from foreign foods or from cheaper sushi produced by lower-skilled workers.  This will shift the composition of apprentices toward somewhat older individuals, and indeed the movie suggests this has happened under Jiro. Jiro: “I have been able to keep at the same line of work for seventy-five years.”  The viewer does not expect anyone else in the movie to be making the same claim, years from now.  In the meantime, such an economy is not good at reallocating labor in response to sectoral shifts. At age 85 Jiro holds three Michelin stars, although his restaurant has only ten seats and the bathroom is outside and down the hall. They serve slightly smaller portions to the female customers, so that everyone in a party finishes their portion at more or less the same time.

Addendum: The new “SushiBot” makes 3,600 pieces of sushi an hour, albeit at lower quality. Previous post: What (and how) Whit Stillman reads Next post: The WSJ reviews *An Economist Gets Lunch*Sushi BluSushi 2012Sushi DvdJiro'S SushiSeat SushiSushi BarsSushi FilmSushi CookbookSushi CinemaForwardJiro Dreams of Sushi- An AMAZING documentary about an 85-year-old sushi master who has become a legacy in Tokyo for creating the world's most perfect sushi and is training his son to take over his legacy when he retires. Inspiring story that would be great for a family documentary night! Séances VOD DVD et Blu-Ray C'est l'histoire d'un vieux japonais tout chauve qui fait des massages de 45min aux pieuvres, vénère Joël Robuchon et qui,...Jiro Ono, 89, widely considered the world's greatest sushi chef, has some dire news for aficionados of raw fish: The delicacy's best days may be behind us."The future is so bad," the owner of the three Michelin star-rated restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro, who was the subject of the 2011 documentary "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," told CQ in December.

"Even now I can't get the ingredients that I really want. sushi grade fish refrigeratorI have a negative view of the future. jiro dreams of sushi memorable quotesIt is getting harder to find fish of a decent quality."sushi grade tuna seattle The reason is overfishing, particularly of the endangered bluefin tuna, a sushi staple. sushi conveyor belt restaurant torontoWith 90 percent of the world's fisheries deemed either maxed out or overexploited, we may be, as one conservationist put it, in the era of "peak wild fish."youda sushi chef 2 gratis online

Whether the ocean apocalypse that Ono foresees comes to pass will depend on conservation efforts and international accords with spotty records of preventing overfishing. how to make sushi rice metricYet fish aren't about to disappear from stores or restaurant menus. order sushi online northamptonThere just may be fewer wild fish hunted and hauled out of the seas. Farmed fish will pick up the slack. As the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau said: "We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunter. That is what civilization is all about — farming replacing hunting."By some measures, this transformation is well underway: Almost as much fish is produced via aquaculture as is caught at sea, according to a recent report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

For certain species of fish and seafood, almost all that is consumed is farm-raised. For example, about 90 percent of all shrimp eaten in the U.S. is farmed, as is almost all European sea bass, sometimes sold in the U.S. as branzino.Perhaps salmon best sums up the promise, and drawbacks, of aquaculture. Once a luxury, it is almost as ubiquitous on restaurant menus and in supermarkets as steak or chicken, and 70 percent of the production comes from farms in Canada, Norway, Britain and the United States.The economic case for salmon farming is undeniable. The fish is more efficient at converting feed into protein than cattle. It takes anywhere from 1.5 to 3 pounds of feed to produce a pound of salmon, whereas as much as a dozen pounds of feed is required to yield a pound of beef.But the environmental case for salmon farming is more complicated, and intensive production poses problems. Salmon are predators that require a diet made up largely of other fish, such as sardines, anchovies or herring, which are ground up and made into pellets that are fed to salmon in netted pens floating in coastal waters.

These forage species also make up the largest share of the wild fish caught every year. Catch rates have been in decline, however, and there are doubts about whether today's harvests are sustainable. Research into feed that relies less on other fish and more on cereals and potatoes might help ease the demand for forage fish.And, for the moment, large-scale farming at sea suffers from many of the flaws of industrial farming on land (without, perhaps, the ethical qualms that attend raising warmblooded animals in often-inhumane conditions for human food).Fish farms pack thousands or even millions of animals in close quarters, conditions that favor the transmission of infections from bacteria and parasites. Just like animals on terrestrial farms, fish in aquaculture pens often must be treated with antibiotics and parasiticides. And though they may be less obtrusive than industrial farms on land, fish farms are also a source of pollution from animal waste and unconsumed food that falls to the sea bottom and decomposes.

Some in the industry hold out hope that genetically modified salmon that grow twice as fast as wild salmon may offer a way forward. The Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve commercial production of GM salmon amid objections by environmental groups and members of Congress. Some supermarket chains, under pressure from consumer groups, have vowed not to sell the modified fish even if it is cleared for production.Even if aquaculture offers answers, Ono is right about one thing: None of this will help with the depletion of prized wild species such as bluefin tuna, whose stocks have been depleted by more than 96 percent in some parts of the world. They have become so rare that they can fetch astronomical prices. Last year a 500-pound tuna sold for almost $1.8 million at a Tokyo seafood auction.Sushi devotees shouldn't despair just yet. Researchers keep trying to farm bluefins from egg to maturity, though doing so poses challenges: As juveniles, bluefins have a larval stage and feed on other fish larvae and microscopic sea creatures that consume algae.