Original subtitles

At the gateway of the Mediterranean Sea

lies a trap three millennia in the making.

Above water, it appears only as a long band of bright orange buoys.

But below, something much more significant is happening.

A labyrinth of rope and knots,

designed to break the springtime migration

of one of nature's most brilliant predators...

the Atlantic bluefin tuna.

There are few ingredients that involve a more diverse and complex network

of craftsmen, artisans, chefs, brokers and diners than the bluefin tuna.

But the most surprising twist of this story has come in the last 50 years.

Lot number three! Lot number three! Lot number three!

What was once so undesirable...

Get out of there.

...is now what makes it so valuable for people around the world.

Few animals better display the dizzying breadth of the global food economy

and the power of the human appetite to transform the world.

And the start of that journey

is a confrontation between fisherman and the sea.

The almadraba.

You can spend your whole life at sea,

but you must never lose respect for it.

The best bullfighter can be caught by the bull.

The same happens here.

I've lived in Barbate all of my life.

My mother and my father are from Barbate.

When I was 16 years old,

I started diving, I started fishing.

Everyone chooses their own path.

Good morning.

Along the coast of southern Spain,

one of the world's oldest fishing traditions

continues in the same way it was born.

At daybreak, in boats loaded with seasoned fishermen,

the air heavy with doubt about what the day's catch will bring.

They call this the almadraba,

a bluefin hunt that stretches from spring into early summer.

The almadraba is a way of life.

When February comes, you can start to smell the almadraba.

And when May arrives, you know it's time for tuna, tuna and more tuna.

Thirty years ago, the global bluefin stock was so low

the almadraba nearly disappeared.

Today, bluefin is one of the most valuable fish in the ocean,

just as it was when the Phoenicians established the elaborate fishing system.

Three thousand years later, the trap remains largely unchanged.

The person who invented this was an artist.

He was a true genius.

"He thought, "How can I catch these animals using a fixed-net system in the water

where they enter and don't know how to leave?"

The power of the almadraba is its simplicity.

There's minimal by catch with the netting system.

Everything that's smaller, from anchovies to squid to baby bluefin, slips through,

leaving only the mature tuna.

When you jump into the water, you forget about everything.

You're just there with the tuna and that's it.

The animal, when it sees the fishnet and the darkness of that fishnet,

it gets scared.

The divers herd the shoal using bubbles from their air tanks.

Any wrong move and the tuna could bolt back the way they came.

With a simple string, a diver counts off today's harvest.

A hundred fish per knot.

800 in total.

Then the trap door is carefully tied shut.

Net on board! Net on board!

With every pull of the net, the fish come closer to the surface.

The captain of the fleet makes his call.

It's time to hunt.

There's a good reason this system is still known by its Arabic name.

Almadraba, "a place for fighting."

I have a blow here, on my face, in the jaw area.

It was a tuna. A big tuna that weighed 500 kilos.

You can never lose respect.

Never.

There is one major change to the ancient fishing technique.

The lupara, a long steel firearm.

Introduced in recent years to bring order to the almadraba.

With one 12 mm hollow-point bullet, the end comes quickly.

No slow suffocating in a net.

No thrashing on a hook.

Just a direct, instant death.

When you shoot the tuna, it remains intact.

In this way, the tuna doesn't suffer. It doesn't drown.

It keeps its blue color, its yellow color.

It remains beautiful.

Death affords this fish a monetary value,

ownership, even legal protection.

A yellow tag becomes its passport

from the deck of this boat to the other side of the planet.

This tuna, pulled from the waters of southern Spain,

is no longer a wild animal.

Now it's a global commodity.

Highly valuable and imminently perishable.

From here on, each step of its complex journey

is carefully designed, down to the finest detail.

The business of bluefin began with the Phoenicians

when they transported salted tuna across the Mediterranean Sea

to be eaten in Greek taverns.

The Romans came next and added another layer of value.

They pressed sun-dried tuna into one of the world's first fish sauces, garum,

which kept this region of southern Spain flush for centuries.

But the time from catch to kitchen has shrunk dramatically.

Today, it's all about freshness, maintaining the cold chain, unbroken.

The internal temperature of a tuna in transit

must never rise above four degrees Celsius.

I don't understand much about how the almadraba works.

What I do understand is fish on land.

When we unload a fish, it's very important that the tuna always stays cold.

We work within a short time frame.

A fish that arrives at 6:00 a.m.

needs to be on its way to various markets by 10:00 a.m.

Each market demands different quality.

There are some buyers who are more demanding than others.

I administer tests to check for quality.

You can assess the fat, the color, everything.

If the quality is not good, the color will show up foul.

Bluefin represents just 1% of tuna fished from the ocean.

Skipjack, yellowfin, albacore.

These are the species that dominate the shelves and coolers in markets

across the world.

But bluefin has something special that gives it more value: fat, and lots of it.

The combination of tender, delicate flesh and savory intramuscular fat

is what the world has come to crave and value so highly.

It's what keeps companies like Petaca Chico busy filling orders,

transporting tuna to buyers in Spain, Europe and beyond.

Now the demand is increasing worldwide.

It's the main reason why the price of fish will continue to rise.

But behind every refined technique used in this process,

there's a constant presence.

A potent force that keeps their nets moving.

A presence so significant that between 1970 and 1990

the average price of bluefin tuna paid to Atlantic fishermen had risen by 10,000%.

Who helped turn tuna from a trash fish into treasure?

Japan.

It began in the 1960s.

At the time, tuna hardly featured in Japanese cuisine.

The fatty meat was fed to pets, but it wasn't a prized fish.

And then times changed. People changed. Tastes changed.

Beef became popular in postwar Japan,

priming the national palate for darker, richer meat.

Bluefin was no longer by catch, it was the catch.

But in the oceans around Japan, there was only a limited number of them.

Demand and prices rose,

but the number of tuna that could be bought and sold did not.

Until someone changed the equation.

Akira Okazaki, a middle manager

working in the freight department of Japanese Air Lines.

In the 1970s, his task was to find freight

that could be loaded into empty planes flying the return leg home.

By jet, in 15 hours,

your goods are in Tokyo or across the pole in Paris.

High value goods that needed to be moved quickly

and could be guaranteed to sell.

Okazaki-san found bluefin tuna.

Three years of constant testing

were necessary to evolve a cooling panel system container

that was not only light enough, but would keep tuna in a fresh condition

at a perfect 32 degrees Fahrenheit for a period of 40 hours.

In 1972, the first tuna was flown from Canada to Japan.

These weren't frozen fish, they were fresh.

A matter of days from ocean to auction room floor.

The systems built to transport tuna,

the cooling technology, the logistics, the regulations and paperwork,

were soon used to transport other high value food items.

And thus, the modern worldwide food web was born.

Asparagus from Ecuador,

strawberries from Morocco,

abalone from Oman.

Time, value and demand.

Sprinkle enough of all three ingredients

and the space between origin and eater shrinks,

as long as you're willing to pay the right price.

Lot number one!

1,425!

With such a complex delivery system,

it's no surprise that tuna are big business.

The best bluefin sell for a hundred thousand dollars or more.

And it's the job of the auctioneer to make sure

that the price is as high as possible.

Hundreds of bluefin, dozens of countries of origin,

and a legion of licensed brokers ready to fill orders

for thousands of buyers across six continents.

If there was ever a display of the might of the global food economy,

it's on the auction room floors of these fish markets all across Japan.

2,900 yen!

And if two buyers land on the same bid, the old playground favorite,

Rock paper scissors, brings the deal to a civilized conclusion.

There's no greater collection of sea creatures

anywhere on Earth than across Japan's many fish markets,

like this one in Osaka.

This vast space unfolds like an encyclopedia of the seven seas.

Flatfish and crustaceans.

Bottom feeders and bivalves.

Tiny shrimp and giant squid.

A salt-scented testament to our dominance of the open oceans.

These markets are a nexus of movement from the poles to the equator.

If it can be caught, if it can be eaten, there's a fair chance it will end up here

or at any of the hundreds of international fish markets

across the world's urban centers.

But for all of the breathtaking might of the modern fish market,

it begs a pressing question.

Can the oceans withstand the human appetite?

I dream about tuna every day.

365 days a year, tuna is all I think about.

Even on my days off, I wonder what the tuna will be like tomorrow.

For some, bluefin is both a business and an obsession.

Yukitaka Yamaguchi is not just a tuna wholesaler,

he's a tuna whisperer.

A man possessed by every detail of this magnificent fish.

The sensation when I cut into a tuna really gives me a moment of calmness.

It is a moment when I feel free and clear.

I honestly can't imagine my life without tuna.

The glint of the skin.

The smell of the fat.

The density of the flesh.

Each is a clue in Yamaguchi-san's pursuit for the optimal fish.

This devotion to the details has earned him his nickname,

the "Tuna King" of Tokyo.

There is no bible.

I use my many years of experience to understand tuna.

After all, you can't really understand tuna until you open it up.

Center belly of a net-fished tuna. This one is seriously fantastic.

Let's clean it. That's fantastic.

Number 17's upper belly.

Yamaguchi-san and other skilled fishmongers in Japan

don't just sell the loins and bellies of bluefin.

This is huge. Three of them is okay?

Prized cuts are fashioned from the marbled cheeks,

the meaty column, the sinewy tail.

They said a lean piece is okay, right?

- Yes, they did. - This one works.

Behind this finely-tuned craft

is a vital Japanese concept, mottainai.

"Nothing goes to waste."

Fujinaga, what do you think of this dark spot? No good?

It's a noble philosophy for any and all food,

but especially for a creature as extraordinary as the bluefin.

This cut will sell really well.

His business exports tuna

bought on the Tokyo auction floor to customers across the world.

TO DUBAI

Each day he might process up to 30 tuna

destined for one of the 1,000 restaurants Yamaguchi-san supplies.

Good morning!

As a specialist, I have to know everything about tuna.

- So, are you going to fillet some tuna? - I am.

This is absolutely essential. I must be able to answer any question about it.

The ones from Wakayama you gave me looked a bit hard when I opened the box,

but they actually weren't at all.

- Because those are trolling tuna. - I knew it.

- The trolling tuna was really good. - Yeah, they are soft.

I learn from my own conversations with customers

and from eating their sushi

which type of tuna goes best with the rice they serve.

One man in particular

values Yamaguchi-san's level of craft and experience.

Takashi Saito, a modern master of edomae sushi.

Even if you're skilled at making sushi, you cannot consider yourself a sushi chef

unless you purchase the ingredients yourself.

You have to have knowledge of what you think is good for cooking or making sushi.

Boss, I'm taking off, but see you on Monday.

- Got it. Thank you very much. - Thank you.

Thank you again.

It was around the time I graduated from high school.

The master from the fish shop where I worked part-time

took me to a sushi restaurant.

It left a strong impression on me.

It seemed like such a refined world, and I thought it was really cool.

But I actually fell in love with sushi while making it.

At the time, it was more like hanging on

than making sushi.

There were many people, maybe ten, and a few who quit after just one day.

After six months, that number was cut in half.

And after one year, I was the only one left.

The only time I held a knife was when I was cooking for my seniors.

But little by little, it started to make me feel happy.

So, I decided to live my life this way.

Sushi is dependent on ingredients.

We prepare the sushi to bring out the flavors.

That's what we do.

The rest is your technique and intuition.

It is truly unique.

Sushi is just a topping, rice and soy sauce.

It's incredibly simple.

It is not a matter of trying to do it perfectly,

but of having the body and mind in the same state.

Sushi is all about balance.

Saito-san is what the Japanese call a shokunin.

An artisan deeply and uniquely dedicated to his craft.

A knife-maker.

A ceramics master.

A sushi chef.

Each spends a lifetime trying to learn

and refine the tiny details of their chosen path.

It takes a shokunin to honor the impossible voyage of the bluefin tuna.

To turn its mixture of fat and flesh

into a bite you'll think about for days or longer.

Raw fish, slightly warm, vinegared rice and the muscle memory

of a lifetime spent training to serve this one bite.

That's why people wait for years to book a seat at Saito-san's Hinoki countertop.

Because sushi at this level

is one of the food world's greatest acts of transformation.

I serve the tuna in the order of lean, medium and fatty tuna.

We want to show our customers that even if the texture is the same,

the taste is so different.

For example, the lean part, akami, is from the back of the fish.

And the medium fatty part, chutoro, is from the midsection.

The fattiest cut, otoro, is from the belly.

So the red part has the least amount of fat,

but the lack of fat gives it more flavor and acidity.

The chutoro and otoro have fat and the chutoro

has the best balance between the lean and the fatty pieces.

And he feels,

every day at the market, he can see the difference with the fish?

Less and less fish.

Do you notice the difference in the market environment

every time you go to Toyosu Fish Market?

Compared to ten years ago when Tsukiji Fish Market was still around,

there's a huge difference in the market atmosphere.

The number of tuna is no longer the same as it was ten years ago.

I no longer can see monster like fish that make me say, "Wow!"

Now, the food supply is disappearing rapidly,

so the food chain is also disappearing, right?

The number of fish is decreasing rapidly.

Today, the price isn't only high because the food is delicious,

it's because there is not enough fish to go around.

That's why it's so difficult. It's a real dilemma.

I'm grateful to be able to sit here once in my lifetime.

Both for the deliciousness and for the chance

to witness such mastery.

Here at Sushi Saito, the quality of the bluefin

and the lifetime of practice and expertise means the fish comes at a premium.

Elsewhere, the bluefin economy puts a different valuation on the fish.

Welcome! Are you on your own?

- I'm meeting somebody. - Meeting someone? Okay.

Come this way. Please sit here.

FRESH BLUEFIN CHUTORO

Conveyor belt sushi was developed in Japan

in 1958 to feed rapidly growing appetites with fewer employees.

The concept was simple: faster, cheaper, more.

Anything on a plastic plate,

including otoro nigiri, a best seller, costs 200 yen.

About a buck 50.

In a country that consumes about half a million tons of tuna a year,

a high percentage is delivered by conveyor belt.

More than any other style of eating,

affordable sushi has introduced bluefin to a wider audience

and tested the future of this fish.

Food has always been a measurement of the distance between us.

2,000 years ago, Chinese caravans spent years on the Silk Road

to haul European staples like wheat and wine to the Far East.

In the 15th century, Venetian spice merchants took months

to bring nutmeg and peppercorns by boat to the West.

Now, Atlantic bluefin is caught in the Mediterranean on Monday,

sold at auction in Tokyo on Tuesday,

and on its way to a poolside two-top in Bali

before the sun sets on the third day.

Thank you.

- It's good. - In a matter of decades,

the fish became the ingredient the world couldn't get enough of.

Mmm.

Sushi was such a brilliant showcase for bluefin

that the rest of the world began to reconsider it.

Bistros in Paris.

Cevicherías in Lima.

Food trucks in Las Vegas.

Food cultures around the world have found a way

to harness the fat and flavor of bluefin.

But have our tastes grown too narrow?

There's an ocean full of fish out there.

Why is it that we always end up eating the same ones?

Sea bass from South America.

Halibut from the North Atlantic.

Salmon from just about everywhere.

But is there another way?

Hey, guys. What's going on?

What's up, guys? How are you all doing?

I'm on my way to sing some flamenco.

See you soon.

I've always admired Ángel León.

He's dedicated his career to elevating the unsung heroes of the ocean.

At his restaurant, Aponiente,

located just up the coast from the almadraba,

he's done the near impossible.

Earning three Michelin stars using largely unknown local fish

instead of global stars like lobster and caviar.

For Ángel León,

the fact that he's still able to buy tuna, caught in the waters around Cádiz

is nothing short of a miracle.

In 2009, the population of these tuna were on the brink of collapse.

All countries involved in the bluefin trade

were forced to face reality.

They came together to save the species and their industry,

with Japan offering a path forward.

The key is the yellow tag,

the bluefin's passport.

Every Eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna is given one.

A unique identity for each fish,

traceable throughout the world.

It's enough to hold all the stakeholders accountable.

And enough to help pull the Eastern Atlantic bluefin

back from the brink.

But it remains a fragile balance.

If I didn't live in Cádiz, I wouldn't cook tuna.

Because I think it's a global fish that has lost its identity.

You can eat it in New York, you can eat it in Zaragoza,

you can eat it in Madrid, you can eat it in Castellón.

But the soul is here, in the water, in the history, in the culture.

It has lost its essence.

I would never order tuna outside of where I live.

And I think that is the problem.

We live in a world that is a little extravagant.

Everyone wants to eat the best that the world has to offer.

And the bluefin is the most coveted in the sea.

It's done. Guys, let's get it on the stake, please.

One, two, three. There. Good.

We don't open our minds to think that if this animal is fished here,

maybe the logical thing would be for it to stay in this area.

But in the end, it is money that makes it worth three times more

somewhere else than here.

I think that in the end we need it to travel so that we can eat it too.

Because otherwise it would not pay for the infrastructure of the tuna fishery,

the fishing vessels, the whole space.

It's a paradox, isn't it?

The food world is filled with these types of paradoxes.

And bluefin means something different to everyone.

Let's eat. Eat this, please.

Please.

For the people of Barbate,

it's a culture that stretches back generations.

Keep shining

My sailor's lantern

And so shine the corals That my siren wears in her hair

There she goes

Spilling salt at Caños de Meca Where I wait for her...

So what's the right thing to do?

It can be hard to know which food to eat or which system to support.

But the powerful part is that our food choices are one of the most direct ways

that we can shape the kind of world we want to live in.

And so shine the corals That my siren wears in her hair...

For now,

our combined efforts have helped rebuild the Atlantic bluefin population.

It's a delicate reminder of how easily our appetites can upend the world

and how important it is to learn from our mistakes.

With a bluefin from Barbate

I'll give it all to my mother to eat

Olé!