Still eat, Japanese eels are dying out

At the beginning of 2018, the Japanese fishing industry faced an "extreme shortage of eels" with only 100 kilograms of local eel fry caught, which was only 0.2% of the amount caught in the same period the previous year, according to the Mainichi Shimbun and other media reports. 0.2%.

　　In 2019, the eel shortage, which has continued for the sixth year, has not improved either.

　　According to the Japan Fisheries Agency, the catch of eel fry during this year's fishing season was only 3.7 tons, the lowest level since 2003, due to a change in the warm current, the "Kuroshio Oyashio", which affected the return of eel fry, and a long history of overfishing.

　　The production has become less, and with it, the price has soared. The price of eel has now exceeded 5,000 yen (RMB 320) per kilogram.

　　Since the Japanese eel made the IUCN (World Conservation Union) endangered list in 2014, the freedom of the eel on a global scale seems to have gotten further and further away from us. At the beginning of the story, the eel was a marketing

　　Eel has a name on the menus of all three East Asian countries, but to say that it enjoys a domination-like influence is undoubtedly in the context of Japan. The world-famous Kamaboko eel, which has been popular in the East for three hundred years, started out as a marketing exercise for caterers.

　　Hiraga Genouchi, a scholar of the Edo period, was the first person to start this storm.

　　It is said that when a friend of his opened a new eel store and asked him to inscribe a plaque on his behalf, Hiraga Genuchi had the bright idea to write one of the most provocative slogans in the history of Japanese food: "The day of the earth with ugly is the day of eel, and if you eat it, you will not lose to the summer heat".

　　A friend's eel restaurant became so popular that peers followed suit, and eating eel gradually became a traditional summer-only food custom for Japanese people.

　　The emergence of eel rice, however, came a little later.

　　According to legend, during the Bunka period (1804-1818), Okubo Imasuke, a patron of a theater troupe in Hashi Sakai-cho, couldn't bear to watch the eel get cold, so he lined it with steaming hot japonica rice to keep it warm.

　　This simple and unpretentious combination of rich eel meat, sweet sauce and fragrant rice has since become one of the mainstays of Japanese food culture.

　　Every summer, the Urawa Eel Festival is held in Saitama Prefecture, Japan, which is rich in river nets and fishery products, attracting eel lovers from all over the country with their families.

　　Those who don't go to the eel festival are sure to line up for hours in front of each famous restaurant to have a bowl of the best eel rice they can remember. In the Japanese world, the existence of eel rice in summer is equivalent to that of dumplings in northern China during the winter solstice.

　　One name that must be mentioned for the eel rice that has reached China and become so popular among the young crowd is Kojima Genta.

　　The little fat boy in "Detective Conan" is the first spokesman of Japanese eel rice in the minds of countless Chinese post-90s, and he weighed 90 pounds at the age of seven, two-thirds of which was due to eel rice.

　　It is because of his unique skill of "reasoning about anything to eel rice" that the Japanese food has been widely recognized among the youth group before it became popular in China.

　　The children who watched Kojima Genta crave eel rice have grown up, so evaluating eel rice has become an important daily pastime for Chinese youth. The list of must-eat Japanese food in first- and second-tier cities is never short of high-priced or even sky-high eel rice.

　　These eel restaurants are elegantly decorated, the wait staff is well-trained, and the menu must have only a few three or four items, with more choices instead of enough style.

　　The chef is either Japanese or a Chinese student who studied under a Japanese master, and the prices are often in the hundreds, so it is not the bowl of plain family eel rice that Kojima Genta misses, but more like a symbol of low-key luxury with substance.

　　But in Western countries that prefer to eat large seafood, eel seems to be less popular. In their eyes, the eel is more like the giant Loch Ness monster of centuries-old legends than the fatty and oily food. Without eels, what can we eat?

　　There are 19 species of freshwater eels around the world, collectively known as eels, and the most popular one is the Japanese eel. The Japanese, who account for 1.2% of the earth's population, eat 70% of the world's eels, so they began artificially farming eels off the coast a hundred years ago.

　　In the last thirty years, China has also built large eel breeding bases in Guangdong and Fujian, with the largest located in Shunde (no surprise to the old artist).

　　Said artificial breeding, in fact, in the fry stage is still completely dependent on wild fish fry.

　　Japanese eels spawn in the world's deepest waters - the Marianas Trench, and humans intercept and catch the eggs when they grow into fry and swim back to fresh water from the ocean, and put them into breeding bases to grow up.

　　This chain of artificial breeding is well established, but also extremely fragile because it relies almost entirely on natural sources of fry. The cost of conceiving eel fry through artificial insemination can be as high as RMB 60,000, making commercial mass production clearly impossible.

　　With technology unable to break through anytime soon, the shortage of wild fry is only getting worse, and the plight of having no eels to eat seems imminent.

　　Mori Tsukamoto, a Japanese authority on eelology, issued an initiative to eel lovers in 2017: "Cherish eels and eat them in moderation. It is enough to eat eel a few times a year on days that deserve congratulations."

　　Desensitization to eel, though reluctant, is a hurdle that lies ahead of eel lovers. The choice before consumers is between "eating eel today, but not next year" and "holding back now for a future reunion".

　　Worries about the disappearance of eels haunted the Japanese people, and an eel information account on Twitter called "eel extinguishing activities", which recorded the amount of eels caught and the changes in trading prices, gained 15,000 followers in just two or three weeks.

　　The left hand is a big love, the right hand is a small love, caught in a dilemma of the old artist choose the middle course. Eat some alternatives to eel and reap the same kind of happiness.

　　Instead of Japanese eel, there are several species to gorge on, including flower eel, Hale eel, Filipino eel and American eel. These species spawn in the wild in large numbers, and as long as they are fished wisely there is no serious endangerment problem, so people can eat them with peace of mind.

　　In Japan, the eel aisle, which used to be full of eels, is gradually showing a new face.

　　Panko, mackerel and salmon baked in eel sauce can also be rich in fat and tender; eel-flavored roasted catfish developed by Kinki University not only has an eighth of a resemblance to eel in appearance, but also does not lose in taste at all, and was launched by retail giant Aeon as a fist product.

　　Eel is limited, but the creativity of foodies is unlimited. The crisis of eel may be an opportunity for creative cuisine.

　　If a few less meals of eel can save the ecology of the ocean, old artists will not hesitate to raise their chopsticks and say, "I do" to all creative alternatives to eel.