At almost any strip mall in America, next to the Foot Locker or Blockbuster, you can find a neighborhood sushi restaurant. Gone are the days when sushi consumption was the province of Hollywood stars, New York socialites, or pampered teens like Molly Ringwald in “The Breakfast Club.” As Sasha Issenberg points out in his new book “The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy” (Gotham Books, 352 pages, $26), the greatest demand for sushi chefs in America today comes from Salt Lake City, and Stillwater, Okla. More cosmopolitan locales have apparently reached their saturation point. “The Midwest,” says Jay Terauchi of the California Sushi Academy in Los Angeles, “could take it to the next level.”

Maybe because flashy Asianthemed aesthetics (golden dragons, red lacquer) have never been part of sushi-eating, even the cheapest sushi joints, in the most unlikely places, manage to preserve a basic sense of authenticity. The décor of the sushi restaurant has always been about simplicity: clean surfaces, bright lights, maybe a rice-paper screen or some bamboo. And of course, the food itself — in its purest form — consists of basic, identifiable elements. The behind-the-scenes sorcery that creates General Tso’s has no place in a sushi restaurant, where the chef constructs his dishes directly in front of his customers.

But the sushi “tradition” is a much more recent phenomenon than many would assume. As Mr. Issenberg writes, “Japanese history killed off the samurai at the same point in the mid-nineteenth century that it birthed the sushi chef.” Though the process of using rice to pickle fish had been used for centuries, modern-day sushi has its origins in 19th-century Edo (present-day Tokyo), where it was a sold as a street food from collapsible stalls. Traffic and hygiene concerns forced many of these vendors to close in the late 1930s, but by that time several sushi restaurants had opened in the Tokyo area.

What most people think of as sushi in its purest form — tuna, rice, seaweed — was virtually unknown until even more recently. As Mr. Issenberg writes, “The Platonic ideal of the ‘authentic’ and the ‘traditional’ sushi experience — a fatty, pink slice of toro nigiri served by a sushi chef to a customer seated before him — is in fact no older than the California roll,” an American innovation born in the 1960s. (The California roll was the result, allegedly, of an attempt to provide a substitute to tuna, only available for a few months of the year, which would appeal to American tastes.) Until the postwar years, the oily belly cut of tuna — today the most valuable part — was thrown out or used as cat food by the Japanese.

As the Japanese developed a taste for the fatty fish (Mr. Issenberg ventures that this expansion was aided by the influx of steaks and hamburgers in the MacArthur years), the average price paid to fisherman rose astronomically. By the early 1990s, bluefin tuna sold for $40 a pound at the auctions in Japan. Today, at the 57-acre Tsukiji market in Tokyo — the global hub for tuna exchange — 400 buyers specialize in tuna, individual fish regularly sell for $30,000, and traders exchange about $6 billion annually. Technological innovation has made it possible to import fish from all over the world. Nitrogen freezers, which can descend to temperatures of -76 degrees Fahrenheit, can stop the molecular activity that causes decay in the fish. A fish caught in Gloucester, Mass., might make its way to Tokyo, before being shipped off to Buenos Aires, and served a month or two later.

This is isn’t a book that will put you off your tuna roll (although Mr. Issenberg speculates that the fish that ends up at the end of your chopsticks probably spent a few hours on the floor at Tsukiji). But it does undermine the myth that sushi is a “simple” or “fresh” food — there are simply too many handlers and too much time in transit for this to be true. Mr. Issenberg profiles these handlers: an airline employee who pioneered the transoceanic shipping of tuna; a Caucasian tuna chef who brought sushi to Austin, Texas; and others. The profiles drag on, relentlessly underlining Mr. Issenberg’s point that sushi exists because of a global economy dominated by a motive for profit.

There are a few exceptions, people who love what they serve or buy or — as in the case of a lone ranger who monitors the emerging tuna-poaching markets in Libya — have ideals at stake. But in his dogged attempt to trace the trajectory behind the toro nigiri that ends up on a plate at Nobu, Mr. Issenberg sidelines some of the more interesting questions, such as why all of his subjects are male. He offers a brief explanation for why women did not traditionally become sushi chefs — it was thought that their warm hands would damage the fish — but doesn’t broach the sexism that dominates this culinary culture, which is surely a matter globalization may impact. Mr. Issenberg’s book is unashamedly about the commerce of a cuisine, but the culture might actually be the meatier subject.

Ms. Schama is the assistant literary editor at the New Republic.