Like many fine dining chefs, Hideaki Matsuo had always insisted on using only wild fish at his restaurant, the three-Michelin-starred Kashiwaya in Osaka. But during a 2019 stint at Tokyo’s Ryukoku University, where he was studying food science, he was confronted with stark data on collapsing marine stocks.

By the time he earned his master’s degree in agriculture in 2021, his culinary philosophy had undergone a sea change: He pondered about the future of sustainable dining and began exploring using responsibly farmed fish as alternatives to wild-caught ones.

Matsuo says meeting professor Yoshimi Sawada of Osaka’s Kindai University in 2020 was also a pivotal moment that encouraged him to adopt his new philosophy. Sawada’s research on Japan’s seafood sustainability revealed that the country’s iconic species, such as shirosake (chum salmon), sanma (Pacific saury), masaba (chub mackerel), hotate (scallops) and surumeika (Japanese flying squid) face alarming declines.

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