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Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

It set off nonsense alarms in my head, though I don't have first-hand experience - but I had some ideas on how it could be disproven. I went to archive.org and found a book about fish preparation from 1977. Searching for "sashimi" (raw fish sushi) shows several results, including an entire section about it. This tweeter is full of shit.

https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaoffi0000mccl/page/28...

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According to a friend of mine who lives in Japan and fits the stereotype "foodie", reality is somewhere in the middle. Farmed Norwegian salmon was indeed seen as a less desirable option for sushi - and apparently still is. According to him, higher end restaurants usually don't serve salmon sushi. He thought the tweet was a bit sensationalistic and pointed to that Norwegian salmon isn't as popular in sushi as the tweet suggests. But there are other ways to prepare fish besides sushi.

Well, for a foodie it probably isn't, a sushi enthusiast is going to be into the terroir of the fish, farm raised salmon is kinda hamfisted in that sense, slight step above a California roll. But that doesn't preclude it from assuming a niche in the convenience food sort of sushi.

Salmon. Not raw fish.

Proper source: https://www.npr.org/2015/09/18/441530790/how-the-desperate-n...

TL:DR "Traditionally Japanese do not eat salmon sushi and it was invented in the 80's by the Norwegians to to try to sell more of their over abundance of Salmon."

they didn't eat raw salmon because unfrozen salmon has parasites.

aquaculture salmon doesn't have these parasites, likewise deep freezing (as in -20°C for a week or -35°C for a day) makes it safe to eat.

so they knew why they didn't eat raw salmon.

This page specifically suggests using salmon for sashimi, and doesn't present the idea as particularly novel: https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaoffi0000mccl/page/26...

that's not a japanese source, and tells us nothing about the consumption habit of japan before the 90s

This is a book about US cuisine?

yeah I had the same feeling. the way it’s written feels like it’s semi-apocryphal to prove some kind of point about marketing

It would be more convincing if that book were in Japanese. After all, the claim is about the popularity of raw salmon sushi in Japan, specifically.

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