When I was a kid, eating raw fish was considered bizarre, and admitting a love for the stuff was comparable to outing oneself as a tree-worshipper or part-time sword swallower. In its own, strange way, it was cool, but it also put one in the same category as the classmate who ate paste or the kid who sometimes set fire to things.

My parents, who had lived in Asia, were huge fans of sushi and sashimi, which meant that much of my childhood was spent traveling from one squalid Japanese restaurant to another in search of honest-to-goodness fresh fish. My sisters and I usually crunched tempura while my parents gobbled down morsels of hamachi, toro, sake, and saba, rating the various venues and moaning about how good the stuff was. As time went on, the claims that this was "grownup food" started holding less and less water; by the time I was ten, the whole family was in love with raw fish.

In my teenaged years, sushi was more widely known, and was generally considered to be a pretty bizarre, exotic taste, akin to absinthe drinking today. To have a wide knowledge of it, especially as a kid, marked one as a strange and hip fringe dweller, a weirdo among weirdos. In many ways, I have never been as cool as I was at age twelve, when my ability to speak at length about the relative merits of sushi and sashimi more than made up for the fact that my musical tastes were stuck in the early 1970's and I had never heard of the Talking Heads.

One bright side to sushi's comparative unpopularity was that that there was a lot less guilt associated with it. In the eighties, the oceans seemed to contain endless amounts of fresh fish and, as a sushi-lover, it was my god-given right and responsibility to eat as many raw sea creatures as possible. Today, however, the ever-growing popularity of raw fish has led to overfishing and many popular fish are now grown in filthy pens or stand at the brink of extinction.

For people who aren't willing to give up their favorite raw delicacies but still want to support the environment, there is hope on the horizon. The Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation group, has published "Ocean Friendly Sushi," a guide that lists a wide variety of sushi types, ranking them based upon their populations, sustainability, harvesting methods, and relative safety. While hardcopies are available, you can also download a pdf from their website. Alternately, the Monterey Bay Aquarium offers regionally-based guides to sustainable sushi, which are also available for download. Sustainable sushi, here I come!