The Ultimate: Sashimi
Friday, April 3, 2009 - John Greene
As many of you know, the most elite of sashimi dishes is fugu, the poisonous pufferfish, with the torafugu
Sashimi chefs take great care and diligence to ensure that the fish they prepare doesn’t murder their people, frequently training for up to a decade before serving people the fish’s flesh. It’s not uncommon for a dish of fugu, thinly sliced, to cost ¥5,000 (around $50,) and a full-course meal that fully utilizes the edible parts of the fish easily reaching the ¥20,000 mark. Fugu is not cheap and the careful preparation and education it takes to take it on is one of the major factor it attracts a certain clientele.
For another group of consumers, cost is not a factor at all: they want the experience. Many professional chefs actually prepare fugu so that there is a minute amount of poison still on the flesh of the fish, leaving diners with a prickly feeling or numbness on their lips and tongue. It’s not often that you get to say that a meal knocked out your tastebuds and brought you a bit closer to death, hence its attraction among many gourmet diners.
The Fugu’s reputation may be much greater than its actual deathtoll. In fact, the Tokyo Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health’s statistics indicate that there were only between 20 to 44 incidents of fugu poisoning per year between 1996 and 2006 in all of Japan, with a single incident frequently involving multiple diners. In each year, these incidents led to somewhere between 34 and 64 victims being hospitalized and zero to six deaths, for an average fatality rate of 6.8%. The most common deaths related to fugu either involve fishermen eating their catch without proper preparation, but there have been incidents such as kabuki icon Bandō Mitsugorō VIII’s death in 1975. The man, who was commonly thought of as a national treasure, requested four servings of fugu liver in a single meal. With the liver being the most toxic and most difficult to prepare of parts, he gambled a bit too much.
In recent years, Nagasaki University scientists have made an effort to bread a non-toxic variety of torafugu by limiting the fish’s diet to only certain items. They’ve raised over 5,000 of the fish so far, with none of the exhibiting the Tiger Blowfish’s trademark toxicity, but then a question is raised: if there’s no risk, where’s the reward?
Even if the chance of dying from the fish’s venom is minimal, there’s still that risk that attracts so many to fugu. With that risk, that chance eliminated, would the desire to eat the fish go up or down? Will there the number of people willing to try out the fish with its venom removed outweigh those who sought it out solely because of its risks? Much like poker, the danger factor is a great deal of the reward a person gets from enjoying the fish.
