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Where Death Lies

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32 pointskawera14 comments

I'm Scottish and thus was brought up on entirely cooked food.

Fish was bread-crumbed or battered, and was invariably cod. And deep fried. It was always filleted, no bones, and was either a fully filleted piece of quality fish, or fish fingers.

In fact I can't remember a time where I had to eat any kind of meat which was raw. Also, we didn't really eat any kind of shellfish - or at least, I had an aversion to shellfish ever since I was given boiled winkles (sea snails) at a young age - around 4 or 5. So I got fussy with my food - no shellfish, no "sea bugs" - prawns, lobster, whatever wasn't filleted and bread-crumbed or battered fish.

You can imagine the comedy after I married a Japanese woman. The Japanese love raw fish. And me being set in my ways, and 100% stubborn, usually refused to eat raw fish. The only time I've eaten raw fish was after a good few doses of sake, when my inhibitions were lowered. Otherwise, it's a case of "Nope!"

I also decided that moving to Japan was a Good Idea (we had lived in London for 12 years, which as a Scotsman I hated vehemently), and ripped our family (by then we had a son) out to Japan, where we lived and I worked for 6 years - in Koriyama city, Fukushima prefecture, until the magnitude 9 earthquake and subsequent Drama made for a less than perfect life and which was the trigger for me to drag my family over to my native Scotland where we now live, and where the ground is reassuringly Very Ancient and Doesn't Wobble So Much.

So, living in Japan had plenty of comedy. There were the inevitable Family Get-Togethers, and in Japan this invariably involves copious amounts of raw fish, which, if you're me, is "Totally Awesome </sarc>". It means there's 15 plates filled with raw fish sushi and sashimi, and then one plate filled with salads and chicken kari-agi (chicken nuggets for the uninitiated ;) ).

Yep - pretty stubborn and fussy eater all right. The point of this monologue? My motto is "I eat to live, not live to eat".

>Fish was bread-crumbed or battered, and was invariably cod. And deep fried.

Well, that will kill you too. Just much much slower.

> Each year, the Japanese government expects dozens of people to die from eating ill-prepared blowfish

My reading of that is, at least 24 Japanese die every year from eating ill-prepared fugu.

But then comes the following paragraph:

>Chefs undergo rigorous training to receive fugu accreditation and yet, the Japanese government projects that 30 to 50 people will be poisoned each year due to ill-prepared blowfish, and several have died in the past decade.

"Several have died in the past decade" means in 10 years, less than 12-10 have died, which translates to about 1 death every year.

That does not compute with the first quoted paragraph, or did I miss something?

The headline and one line summary at the top were probably written by an editor, not the author. The editor probably skimmed over the piece, saw the line "the Japanese government projects that 30 to 50 people will be poisoned each year", and didn't realize that most poisoning victims recover. Or didn't care.

"the Japanese government projects that 30 to 50 people will be poisoned each year due to ill-prepared blowfish" comports well with "Each year, the Japanese government expects dozens of people to die from eating ill-prepared blowfish", if you assume that being poisoned means dying. Probably a mental hiccup by the author.

You are right. It does not compute. Dozens do not die each year from badly prepared blowfish. It's on TV whenever someone does.

Homer Simpson once consumed poisonous fugu fish. He thought he only had 22 hours left to live. (Fortunately for us, he survived): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Fish,_Two_Fish,_Blowfish,_...

One very well done bit is how quickly Homer progresses through the five stages of grief; it takes him about seven sentences: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0701195/trivia?tab=qt&ref_=tt_tr...

> My family is Chinese-American … A Japanese waitress stood by, smiling, her pen poised over her notepad. It was obvious I was a foreigner from the way I was dressed and from my company; but still, I felt some wild instinct flare up inside of me, an urge to acknowledge our shared ethnicity …

Y'know, there are a huge number of both Japanese & Chinese who would disagree that they have any shared ethnicity at all …

"I raised a piece up, too, examining the gauziness of the meat draped over my chopsticks. I placed it in my mouth—there was next to no flavor though the texture was delicate, like a fine sweet film. And while the skin had great bounce, it was basically flavorless, too."

So, if the flavor is nothing special, is the danger posed by the dish the whole point of consuming fugu?

Isn't there a simple chemical test for the toxins, which a chef could use?

I think a chef's main task involves carefully removing the parts of a fugu where the toxins are known to be concentrated.

Of course, but if they're not always successful, their secondary task should perhaps be to test their food to make sure it's safe.

Yeah I feel like science and some test strips would do the job. But eating blowfish to begin with is ridiculous, and based solely on tradition. Testing for toxins could be seen as disrespecting the tradition.

>Yeah I feel like science and some test strips would do the job. But eating blowfish to begin with is ridiculous, and based solely on tradition.

Citation needed. They ate it centuries ago too, before they even had a tradition of eating it.

It's more bravado than tradition. They don't eat it because "our ancestors ate this too", but because they like the challenge. Who with any sense of bravado wouldn't?

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