The Sunday Read: ‘The Untold Story of Sushi in America’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2021

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1980, when few Americans knew the meaning of toro and omakase, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, spoke to dozens of his followers in the Grand Ballroom of the New Yorker Hotel. It was said Moon could see the future, visit you in dreams and speak with the spirit world, where Jesus and Buddha, Moses and Washington, caliphs and emperors and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and even God himself would all proclaim his greatness. “You,” Moon later recalled telling his followers in the ballroom, “are the pioneers of the fishing business — the seafood business. Go forward, pioneer the way and bring back prosperity.” They did. Today a business they grew and shaped is arguably America’s only nationwide fresh-seafood company of any kind. It specializes in sushi, and its name is True World Foods. One of Moon’s daughters, In Jin Moon, once asked in a sermon whether their movement really made a difference. “In an incredible way, we did,” she said: Her father created True World Foods. “When he initiated that project,” she went on, “nobody knew what sushi was or what eating raw fish was about.” Her father, she concluded, “got the world to love sushi.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Daniel Framson and I'm an editor for the New York Times magazine.
0:05.1	And I'm going to Sharon Art, because I wrote for us recently.
0:11.0	Several years ago, when I was early in the reporting of this story that I'm about to read,
0:16.0	I found myself visiting this turn of the century mansion that is located in the coastal
0:21.6	fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts.
0:23.8	You have to imagine this kind of imposing, tutor style, grand home on a cliff overlooking
0:30.9	Gloucester Harbor, literally built by a diamond mining tycoon in the year 1900.
0:37.5	Something like the Great Gatsby.
0:39.7	Except it was a lot quieter and virtually empty and ended up feeling a little bit like an
0:45.7	abandoned museum.
0:48.4	So we walked in and I mean, the foyer is absolutely covered with photos.
0:53.4	And the photos feature one man in particular, this middle-aged Korean man who is usually
1:01.9	fishing or posing with fish or in various maritime settings.
1:09.4	So for instance, in one photo, he is with a giant halibut, the size of a huge human being.
1:15.2	And in another, there are salmon and he's in Alaska.
1:18.7	And then he's in Hawaii posing with a blue marlin or maybe it was Florida.
1:23.0	And there was even a picture of a couple of his children who were riding a giant bluefin tuna
1:28.1	as if it was a horse.
1:30.5	Probably my favorite photo was of him in a seafood warehouse with his wife and they're
1:35.3	each holding a truly enormous lobster, like a 10 pound lobster.
1:40.2	And his eyebrows are just arched and his mouth is kind of open.
1:43.6	And a look of sheer delight.
	...

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