Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Raw Horse For Breakfast
Monday, June 25, 2007

Every now and then I end up in a conversation about what's the weirdest thing you've ever eaten. Sometimes I tell the story of losing a bet in a Japanese bar once in which I said I'd eat anything on the menu and being served three sparrows, roasted, on a stick, with beaks and claws attached. But usually I tell the story of going to my boss while living in a small rural town (the story is relayed in LEARNING TO BOW) and being served raw horse.

Well, raw horse is back! The NYT runs a story about the tuna shortage and how some sushi bars are resorting to deer and horse instead.

First, the backstory:

In this seafood-crazed country, tuna is king. From maguro to otoro, the Japanese seem to have almost as many words for tuna and its edible parts as the French have names for cheese. So when global fishing bodies recently began lowering the limits on catches in the world’s rapidly depleting tuna fisheries, Japan fell into a national panic.

Nightly news programs ran in-depth reports of how higher prices were driving top-grade tuna off supermarket shelves and the revolving conveyer belts at sushi chain stores. At nicer restaurants, sushi chefs began experimenting with substitutes, from cheaper varieties of fish to terrestrial alternatives and even, heaven forbid, American sushi variations like avocado rolls.

“It’s like America running out of steak,” said Tadashi Yamagata, vice chairman of Japan’s national union of sushi chefs. “Sushi without tuna just would not be sushi.”

Now the solution:

The restaurant’s owner, Shigekazu Ozoe, 56, said the current situation reminded him of the last time he had no tuna to sell — in 1973, during a scare over mercury poisoning in oceans when customers refused to buy it. At that time, he tried to find other red-colored substitutes like smoked deer meat and raw horse, a local delicacy in some parts of Japan.
“We tasted it, and horse sushi was pretty good,” he recalled. “It was soft, easy to bite off, had no smell.”

If worse comes to worst, he said, he could always try horse and deer again. The only drawback he remembered was customers objecting to red meat in the glass display case on the counter of his sushi bar.

“One customer pointed and said: ‘You have something four-legged in your fish case? That’s eerie!’ ”

Labels: Food

Posted by B Feiler at 10:29 AM
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