Pricey Tuna Stinks

A Japanese bluefin tuna was sold at auction Monday for more than $100,000, which drew predictable "wacky story of the day" treatment in the media.

Late in some (but not all) news accounts of the sale, we learn that bluefin tuna is an endangered species because it is, as the Monterrey Bay Aquarium puts it "severely overfished" and hence "should be avoided."

But that doesn't stop seafood brokers from seeking the highest quality bluefin in hopes of fetching ridiculously high prices (is any fish really worth $370 a pound wholesale?). Nor does it stop owners of sushi bars from paying those ridiculously high prices in order to not only make a big premium on sales of toro or hon maguro, but also to get lots of publicity.

Two rival sushi-bar owners, one from Hong Kong and one from Japan, agreed to split the fish. They paid $104,400 for the 282-pound bluefin at auction in Tokyo in what the AP called a "peaceful settlement."

The price is about 10 times the average market value for bluefin, and much higher than the average $25 a pound that tuna in general goes for.

"It was the best tuna of the day, but the price shot up because of the shortage of domestic bluefin," said Takashi Yoshida, a market official, who told the AP that bad weather at the end of December was the proximate reason for the high price.

But wretched excess is the underlying reason, and is the cause of the very overfishing that causes prices to continuously rise.

"Premium fish - sometimes sliced up while the customers watch - also have advertising value, underscoring a restaurant's quality, like a rare wine," the AP says.

But wine isn't endangered. The bluefin, on the other hand, is protected, sort of, by agreements among international conservation groups to cut catch quotas by 20 percent to 22,000 tons.

That might help, but it also means that prices will continue to climb, which will provide incentives for fishers to keep fishing.

And it will provide sushi restaurants to keep selling the fish, and well-heeled patrons to keep eating it. Toro is tasty, no doubt, but rich people don't buy it for the flavor - they buy it because it's so expensive.