Nashville Nigiri: is the spread of sushi to middle-class American malls a good globalization story?

• Author: Koerner, Brendan I.
• Position: On Political Books

Midway through The Breakfast Club, John Hughes's seminal film about Reagan-era teen angst, the five main characters tuck into brown-bag lunches. Actress Molly Ringwald, playing the archetypal suburban princess, pulls out a tray of sushi, to the astonishment of Judd Nelson's drug-addled outcast. "You won't accept a guy's tongue in your mouth, and you're going to eat that?" he sneers, obviously never having sampled a piece of toro (fatty tuna) or hamachi (yellowtail) himself.

Ringwald's character is offended by the innuendo, but also derisive of her inquisitor's lack of sophistication. "Can I eat?" she huffs in response.

"I don't know," says Nelson, eyes wide with revulsion. "Give it a try."

Depicting Ringwald's spoiled brat as an unapologetic sushi eater was an easy way for Hughes to underscore her elitism. In 1985, the year The Breakfast Club came out, sushi was still a mystery to most Americans, who associated the food with flighty Hollywood stars and reprehensible yuppies. Raw fish and seaweed, rolled into cones or tubes? Such dainty, briny fare was surely part of a Japanese plot to weaken the American spirit.

Twenty-two years later, Hughes's cinematic shorthand seems archaic, akin to sticking a handlebar mustache on a movie's villain. No self-respecting American city, however distant from the oceans, is without a sushi restaurant, perhaps one that offers a $12.99 all-you-can-eat special on Monday nights, or prepackaged trays of Philadelphia rolls tinged with cream cheese. Sushi is a favorite of fictional gangster Tony Soprano, and of real-life football demigod Peyton Manning (who, according to the Boston Herald, recently treated on-the-field rival Tom Brady to a dinner of toro tartare, hamachi with elephant garlic, and hot sake).

Sasha Issenberg, a Philadelphia magazine writer (and occasional Washington Monthly contributor) best known for exposing the mendacity of New York Times columnist David Brooks, shares these macho heroes' zeal for sushi. But he also realizes that there's something a smidge bizarre about a world in which the landlocked residents of, say, Oklahoma or Paraguay enjoy seemingly inexhaustible supplies of fatty tuna, while Tokyoites have learned to love unagi (grilled eel) served on buttery croissants. Issenberg's meticulously reported The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy explains not only how sushi evolved from reviled curiosity into beloved treat in the United States, but also how the...