There is no aspect of life that has not been affected by covid-19: from the smallest to the most relevant. In Japan, one of the sacred dishes of its gastronomy, sushi, has also suffered from the pandemic. Japanese tuna experts regularly travel to foreign ports to select the best product that is then imported into Japanese markets and restaurants. The coronavirus has greatly limited its ability to move and the Japanese have used technology to avoid this problem with an application that can only determine the quality and taste with the photograph of the animal's tail.
Dubbed Tuna Scope, the application has been developed by the Japanese advertising agency Dentsu and announces the entry of artificial intelligence on the planet of haute cuisine, as well as in other fields that use the expert eye of professionals to evaluate natural products.
The selection of good tuna is made in hard-fought wholesale auctions where the last word is held by veteran experts, known as mekiki . Its opinion determines the price of a tuna with a simple visual inspection of the open belly and the cut made when the tail is cut off. As if it were a map, this cut reveals to the expert eye the texture, freshness, consistency and above all the amount of fat, the quality most appreciated by the Japanese sushi eater.
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The Mekiki are usually the children of intermediaries who have been selecting fish for restaurants for several generations, and their number, as with other traditional professions, is on the decline. In order to create a mekiki that is available "anywhere in the world 24 hours a day", the developers of Tuna Scope have created a database with the help of experts from the port of Yaizu, west of Tokyo. Its algorithm uses 4,000 images of tuna tails or the equivalent of the number of fish that a professional must examine during 10 years of development.
Tuna Scope aims to become a world standard and to extend its use to other sectors where visual inspection is key to decision-making, such as forestry, agriculture and medicine. It is available on Android after signing a contract with the developer.
Since the beginning of July, a large sushi chain called Kura Sushi, which buys 70% of its fish outside of Japan, uses this software to cope with the difficulty of sending its experts abroad to choose the best pieces. Although confinements have not been mandatory in Japan, many sushi restaurants have reduced their purchasing volume, and Toyosu's wholesale fish market, which since 2018 has replaced Tsukiji's largest in the world, uses online sales directly to individual buyers.
Spain is one of the suppliers of fresh bluefin tuna to Japan and the interruption of flights and the requirement of quarantines for travelers has begun to affect supply.
Although the growing taste for beef and the demographic decline have reduced fish consumption, the Asian country is still the first tuna buyer in the world due to the large number of sushi restaurants, the star dish of its gastronomy.
The price of bluefin tuna is annual news in Japan. In the first auction in January in the Tokyo market, it reaches astronomical figures. In last year's bid, the owner of a famous restaurant chain called Sushizanmai paid a record € 2.7 million for a 278-kilogram tuna caught on the country's north coast.
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