It Gets Much Worse Than Raw Fish

You have two choices when it comes to eating in Japan: stick to the tried and true and only eat things you’re already comfortable with, or just give up and eat whatever creatures happen to be for sale. I opted for the latter.

It’s difficult to figure out which foods are for everyday occasions and which foods they only trot out to laugh at foreigners. Grasshopper, for example, is not considered especially exotic. They’re usually only eaten by the poor, and I can see why. They look like roaches, and within a single grasshopper body you will find an enormous variety of textures, all of them awful. But in my Great Invisible To-do List of Life, I can put a mark next to “Eat a bowl of grasshoppers”.

Namako, on the other hand, is not considered typical fare by the Japanese. You’d be hard-pressed to figure this out on your own, since it often appears on the menu with equal prominence as tuna or salmon. Namako is “sea cucumber,” and goes by the less appetizing alias “sea slug”. Yeah, it’s a little slimy and green, but so is all of the other food. It doesn’t taste like much, actually, but my Japanese friends are all shocked that I’ve eaten it.

Speaking of slimy and green, perhaps some of you have gone through life with the untested notion that it would be delicious to eat crab brains. You would be wrong. The first time I had crab brains was at a restaurant in Yokohama. Each of the seven course featured crab as the
main ingredient, and none of the staff spoke English, so I had no idea what we were eating. I ate my entire bowl of disgusting green pudding, only figuring out the crab connection weeks later. Since then, I’ve tried it once more on a crab brain salad, and it’s still awful. It’s
gritty and bitter and looks like vomit. That you might gain mystical crab powers is about the only thing going for it.

Despite my disgust, crab brains are a highly regarded foodstuff in Japan. Much, much worse than that, though, is the Japanese delicacy shirako. Literally “white children,” it is more accurately translated as … fish semen.

“I love it! It’s very creamy!” said somebody who was definitely not me. Yeah, I’m sure it is creamy. It’s semen. I consider myself to be very open-minded when it comes to food — I had no problem with the grasshoppers — but I refuse to try this. Eating this is emphatically not on the Great Invisible To-do List of Life. Perhaps I’m being sexist and unfair — after all, I like unfertilized fish eggs — but I’ll live with that. Maybe it makes me a “bad person”, but I will not eat fish semen. Supposedly it improves your virility. I doubt it, but even if it worked, is really worth the risk of spawning monstrous fish-babies?

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 4th, 2005 at 8:32 am and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.