A DRIZZLY NIGHT nigh on Halloween and a few hours to while away before heading over to the Castro Theatre for vampire lovers. A new book, new to me, burning a hole in my pannier. An excellent confluence of excuses for a sushi dinner. Nigiri are easy reading food, don't you know. Chopsticks in one hand, paperback in the other – in this case, Sam D'Allesandro's collected stories, The Wild Creatures. The pleasure point pyrotechnics as the tobiko hits the taste buds and words – "There's a little animal inside of me. It's eating me. It's building me each day" – bubble in.

The question of what makes for comfort food deserves an essay for itself. Suffice to say, for now, that sushi, for me, is it. When I'm blue, the cold-fish-and-hot-sake quotient of my credit card bill skyrockets. It could be those Omega 3s. Or a Proustian attempt to recapture that night I first realized I liked sushi (not to mention tempura ice cream) – some 15 years ago at Asa Kuma on Wilshire Boulevard. The first, conscious, enjoyment of a food is a rare memory.

At Tokyo Go Go it was early, and slow. Behind the bar, the chefs on the sushi line had that demeanor of expectant lassitude universal to their profession: tensed for the onslaught. It's kind of the perfect moment to be an inquisitive customer. What's good? Why? What's it like? How is it caught? You've got this captive source of information, standing sentry, waiting for the night's rhythm to get underway. I ate uni (sea urchin) for the first time since my sushi-love realization, and this time I enjoyed it, remembering it bitter but finding it sweet. I learned that I like mirugai (giant clam) – it's a delicious creamy-crunchy, far from the unremitting chewiness I'd expected – and that bluefin is, to quote the chef, the "Cadillac of tuna" and the favored tuna for maguro sushi. A full-grown specimen of this cold-water fish might weigh in at a thousand pounds. Uh-oh, I thought. But ate it anyway, and it was good.

Writing this column denies me the bliss of ignorance. This isn't to say that I know the half of it, but I have a tangible reason to try and find out. When I looked up bluefin tuna, Oceans Alive (www.oceansalive.org) had it labeled "Eco Worst" and "Health Concern" – yup, any fish that big is bound to have a high mercury level – and Seafood Watch (www.mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp) had it down as "Avoid" because it's overfished. Whether caught with longlines or purse seines, there are bycatch problems. Yellowfin, as next-best maguro fish, fares a bit better on Seafood Watch. But it has three subsections. Yellowfin used in maguro is OK only if it's US-caught and fished with longlines. Canned yellowfish is dandy the world over if it's troll or pole-caught, but not if it's Pacific and imported and longline-caught. Got that? Ready to ask before you buy?

The lead-in to last week's This American Life, on National Public Radio, was a conversation with Hannah Allam, Baghdad bureau chief for the Knight-Ridder newspapers, about her recent visit home to the Midwest; it was the longest time she'd spent in the States in almost two years. She was struck by this sense: "It does not seem to me like this country is at war," she said. At an Oklahoma airport, "a female soldier in full camouflage got off the plane, and it was clear she'd just come from Iraq ... and people were looking at her as if she had come from Mars. And it struck me that what was going through people's heads was ... 'Oh, yeah, there's a war going on....' That was the looks on their faces." Without the visceral investment of having a loved one in Iraq, we have this weird privilege of being, on some level, almost untouched. Functionally speaking, my life is no different now from when we weren't at war with Iraq (though it's been so long now, I can barely remember). The effect this war is having and will have just isn't immediately tangible in my life. (That seems ghoulishly insidious when I stop to think about it.)

It's human to ignore what can be ignored. It's human, or animal, even, to continue a behavior if its negative consequences are not immediately obvious. What's to stop me from buying bluefin? It's there in front of me: a luscious meat red and striped with fat. No warning label, no censorious glances from my peers when I order it. Tastes delicious. No bloody bluefin nightmares follow. The world looks the same when I wake up. It's up to me to make the connection, and the choice. E-mail Masha Gutkin at lydialeapfrog@yahoo.com.