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 Shiga Prefecture'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.