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There are few cultural cuisines quite so paradoxical as sushi. On paper, sushi sounds as an utterly abominable premise to western sensibilities: vinegared rice, rolled up inside a wrapping of nori (seaweed), and comprised largely of raw fish and seafood? And yet sushi is a wildly popular dish in the United States. Japanese sushi restaurants could be discovered even in small rural towns, and are everywhere in larger cities. One can even find sushi in most regular supermarkets.

Sushi is available in a wide variety of styles and presentations, depending on their ingredients as well as the method of their preparation, but when most Americans think Sushi, they typically picture makizushi, literally meaning “rolled sushi”. Generally, makizushi is rolled in nori, which is the Japanese name for any of a variety of red alga seaweed species. Given that nori is the key element behind the “rolled” (maki) portion of makizushi, its preparation is essential to the outcome of the entire dish.

From the initial seeding process, through harvest and the final preparation of nori, every step is intensely monitored and managed through a system that has been perfected and well understood for centuries. There are actually over 230 square miles of Japanese coastal waters devoted to the farming of nori, from which around 350,000 tons are harvested a year bringing in roughly two billion US dollars in revenue.

Nori is grown underneath the water hanging from nets that drift upon the water’s surface, where they go on to grow for a period of about 45 days before harvest. After harvested, nori is generally processed by mechanical means designed to imitate the traditional Japanese practices that have been perfected over hundreds if not thousands of years.

These practices aren’t unlike producing paper, and the final result is a dried, paper-thin sheet of nori about 8 inches by 7 inches. Similar to fine wine, the production of nori can be modified to produce a wide range of grades of differing quality and expense. The cheapest varieties, generally produced in Chinese coastal waters, can go for as low as six American cents per sheet. On the opposite end of that scale, nori available only in Japan can go for as much as fifty US dollars per sheet.

A sheet or nori is then generally used to make a single roll of makizushi by actually rolling up the ingredients inside of it to make a tube-like item, which is then sliced up several times to produce the common western image of sushi. There are numerous types of sushi, each differentiated by the number and types of ingredients enclosed in the roll. Nori is also utilized in types of sushi which are not rolled in the typical cylindrical manner, for example Temaki which is a cone shaped configuration of nori that is literally stuffed full of its ingredients, looking something like an ice cream cone.