Shurely not?

Over the last couple of years, I have to confess, I’ve grown a slight liking for sushi food.

Before that I’d heard of it from time to time – in the 1980s my brother worked in Japan for a couple of years and developed a taste for it – but the thought of eating raw food had always rather put me off. There was also the fact that [hopefully this isn’t a racist comment] received opinion from those of older generations, not least those I met who spent time as POWs on the Burma railways, was that the reason most Japanese people were squat of figure and about 4 foot 6 tall was because their traditional diet largely consisted of rice and not much else healthy or cooked.

Then again – ignorance is always a splendid source of fantasy and misinformation – I’d also read about the Japanese custom of serving diners a blowfish (or something similar) of a certain kind that killed you instantly if the chef didn’t do the filleting and spadework correctly before committing the piscatorial subject to the flames.

I well recall a side-splittingly funny episode of The Simpsons in which Homer consumed one and somehow survived.

And then, around the turn of the Century, sushi suddenly became the fashionable thing in London and amongst the chattering classes.

I was not immune to the temptation, especially when the favourite refuges of upmarket shopping (Sainsburys and Waitrose) began positioning shelves of sushi offerings alongside their ditsy salads, ‘quality’ sandwiches and baguettes along their aisles near the checkouts, hoping to draw in nearby harassed workers popping out to get something quick, easy but ‘impressive’ to eat on the hoof at their desks once they’d got back to the office.

Soon there was a proliferation of sushi bars and Japanese restaurants springing up on every high street with any pretension towards self-respect.

At first I dipped in with the most obvious and apparently ‘easy’ (or so it seemed to my Western European tastebuds) choices. They were not unpalatable and about fifty percent of my adherence to them was based around the notion that sushi was clean, healthy and doing me good.

And also, by dowsing most of the individual items in that (is it?) ‘soy’ sauce that comes in the little sachets within the packaging, one seemed to by-pass any qualms about the taste experience because of the extra ‘kick’ it prompted.

I don’t know – I’m having to think back now – I suppose that roughly about once a month, as an aside to doing my normally food shops, I drop by the sushi aisle (Sainsburys these days is ‘going large’ by establishing not just a sushi counter but a veritable fortress block of sushi-makers and marketing staff) and picking up a couple of boxes of stuff and consuming it for my lunch or evening meal.

More recently, however, I’ve been noticing that sushi is receiving some criticism from those who claim to know what they’re talking about.

I’ve been told by a lady of my acquaintance that sushi is not (as I formerly believed) low in calorie content – in fact quite the opposite, is her assertion.

Then two or three weeks ago I read some scare story on the newspaper websites that what the general public – or should that be ‘the sushi-buying’ section of it(?) – doesn’t appreciate is that virtually all sushi is chock-ful of harmful bacteria and worm-like things that badly infect the stomachs of human beings and quite likely cause terminal dysentery.

And now, if all the above is not enough, we now get the following – an article by Jamie Doward in The Observer detailing how we sushi-consumers don’t have a clue as to what we are chucking down our throats – see here, as published on the website of – THE GUARDIAN