The Ethical Assassin

What if there were a perfect way to kill a fish? To make it suffer less, taste better, and extend its shelf life so significantly that more people might enjoy more kinds of fish all over the world? Andrew Tsui knows just such a way. We went to the Gulf of Mexico to meet the Johnny Appleseed of brain spikes.

- BY BRETT MARTIN

THE FISH THAT would die from a spike through its brain in the shadow of an oil rig, 45 miles off the coast of Louisiana, and would be served, 22 days later, in the Grand Salon of the Japanese ambassador's residence in Washington, DC, was about two-and-a-half years old when it made the worst dining decision of its short life. A chunk of barracuda, itself pulled from the water only an hour earlier, proved the fatal temptation. The fish was a yellowfin tuna, 75 pounds, 36 inches long, and pure muscle. Andrew Tsui, the man who caught it, has fished all his life and is in fine shape for a 46-year-old. The tuna nearly pulled his arms off.

We had set out from Venice, Louisiana, into the waters that will eventually consume it, toward the fields of rigs that are at least partially to blame. Until nine days earlier, the body of water we were in had spent the previous 475 years uncontroversially called the Gulf of Mexico. Now, who knew? As if by common consent, none of the nine people pressed together on the 37-foot boat mentioned it. We had been assembled by Tsui, a DC lawyer who is also a roving evangelist for seafood in general, and the Japanese fish-slaughtering method known as ike jime in particular. Ike jime involves euthanizing, bleeding, and destroying the spinal column of a fish as quickly as possible.