Tag Archives: Japan

Mital Pandya: Dangerous dolphin meat

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Mital Pandya writes:

I consider myself a food enthusiast, and I spend a lot of time and effort reading reviews and traveling to seek out the best food out there. However, I don’t eat dolphin, but some people apparently do… Flipper anyone?

In certain regions of Japan, many consider dolphin meat to be a delicacy, though unaware of the dangers associated with the meal. Two elected officials of a Japanese whaling town, Taiji, tested random samples of dolphin meat at supermarkets.

“One dolphin sample had a mercury content 10 times above the health ministry’s advisory level of 0.4 parts per million, with a methylmercury readout 10.33 times over the ministry’s own advisory level of 0.3 ppm.”

The CDC also has an official report on mercury levels warning people of the health hazards of mercury, at http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/tfacts46.html.

“The form of mercury that accumulates in the food chain is methylmercury. When small fish eat the methylmercury in food, it goes into their tissues. When larger fish eat smaller fish or other organisms that contain methylmercury, most of the methylmercury originally present in the small fish will then be stored in the bodies of the larger fish. As a result, the larger and older fish living in contaminated waters build up the highest amounts of methylmercury in their bodies.”

High levels of mercury can cause severe damage to the nervous system, as well as permanent damage to the brain and kidneys, and children are especially susceptible.

Both the short term and long term damages caused by the consumption of dolphin meat are enough for me to say, “Dolphin it’s not for dinner."

Though this problem has been known for years now, it has recently been highlighted in the high-publicity documentary, The Cove, which won the audience award at Sundance Film Festival this year.

“Flipper was one of the most beloved television characters of all time. But ironically, the fascination with dolphins that he caused created a tragic epidemic that has threatened their existence and become a multibillion dollar industry. The largest supplier of dolphins in the world is located in the picturesque town of Taijii, Japan. But the town has a dark, horrifying secret that it doesn’t want the rest of the world to know. There are guards patrolling the cove, where the dolphin capturing takes place, who prevent any photography.” 

Mital Pandya is a current USDA research scientist in Orient Point, NY. In 2007 she received her Masters degree in Public Health from Ohio State University. She is passionate about food, loves to knit, and travel.

Homemade pancakes, Woody Allen and robots

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When Katie Filion lived with us for a few months before setting off for graduate work in New Zealand, Amy and I would tell the 22-year-old, "‘oh, you should see this movie" – insert Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Wonderboys, or even more modern fare like Napoleon Dynamite – at which point she would politely recoil. Maybe she found our movies … old.

However, Katie did confess she now misses my homemade-from-scratch buckwheat pancakes with berries.

Have I got a movie for Katie.

Woody Allen’s 1973 classic, Sleeper, when the director was at a more, uh, slapstick stage of his career, features Allen as Miles Monroe, a jazz musician and health-food store owner living in Manhattan in 1973, who is cryogenically frozen without his consent, and not revived for 200 years. When Miles is arrested as a counterrevolutionary, he escapes by disguising himself as a robot, the kind frequently used in the future for mundane chores like cooking.

Maybe the Japanese like Woody Allen more than the French like Jerry Lewis because various prototype robo-chefs showed off their cooking skills at the International Food Machinery and Technology Expo in Tokyo last week, flipping Japanese pancakes, serving sushi and slicing vegetables.

Narito Hosomi, president of Toyo Riki, manufacturers of the pancake-cooking robot, which was apparently based on me, said,

"We all know that robots can be very useful. We want to take that utility out of the factory so that they can be used elsewhere.”

I have to agree, Katie. While clever, Sleeper is slow.

Couple didn’t know what they were eating

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A 47-year-old Israeli woman crawled feebly to the front door to call for help from a neighbor before passing out. Her partner, also 47, had already fallen unconscious.

FOX News reports that the couple began to feel dizzy after eating a meal of fried blowfish, and could barely breathe when the ambulance arrived.

“From what they have been able to tell us,” Rambam Hospital spokesman David Ratner said, “a neighbor gave them the fish as a gift. They didn’t know what it was; they fried it up for dinner and ate it.“

The couple was unaware of the neurotoxins contained in the skin and certain internal organs of blowfish that are highly toxic to humans. Contacting or ingesting these toxins leads to muscle paralysis and can result in an excruciatingly slow and painful death.

Marine biologist Dr. Nadav Shashar said, though the fish is the second most poisonous vertebrae in the world, it is considered a delicacy in Japan and Korea, "but they know how to prepare it."

Dr. Shashar concluded by saying, “The basic rule of thumb is simple: Don’t stick things in your mouth if you don’t know what they are.”

Don’t eat poop or blowfish poison.

A nation fed on local food?

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The political power of the U.S. president just sets the stage for the presidential family to influence American culture.

I think one of the most interesting galleries at the Eisenhower Museum–dedicated to our 34th president who hailed from Abilene, Kansas (about an hour from where I write)–is the gallery filled with outfits worn by his wife Mamie. Plaques near the outfits describe the impact the former First Lady had on women’s fashion during her husband’s presidency–like many First Ladies before and after her.

Purpose-minded people everywhere hope that their cause will be picked up by a member of the presidential family and instantly regarded as fashionable.

This, of course, includes proponents of local food.

As reported by the New York Times,

“The nonprofit group Kitchen Gardeners International wants to inspire people to grow their own food in home gardens. More recently, its “Eat the View!” campaign has targeted the ultimate home garden — the White House lawn.”

According to the group’s website,

Kitchen Gardeners “are self-reliant seekers of "the Good Life" who have understood the central role that home-grown and home-cooked food plays in one’s well-being.”

Across the pond, the Japan Times reports that, “public trust in food, packaging and labeling [is] crumbling across the nation,” and it’s leading consumers to “tak[e] a healthy interest in vegetables and other locally made produce.”

The article asserts,

“The vegetables and fruits are not necessarily cheap compared with supermarket prices, but people are apparently buying them because they feel safer eating products made by farmers who aren’t afraid to be identified.”

It can’t hurt to know who supplies your food. However, without microbiological evidence of the safety of products and processes, there’s really no guarantee that food produced nearby—or even in your own yard—will be safer to eat than food that’s been in transit for a while.

Sick people just get the comfort of knowing who it was that let the poop get on their food.

 

Recycling used chopsticks

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A Japanese man spent over 3 months gluing together used chopsticks to make a canoe.

Shuhei Ogawara collected the 7,382 chopsticks from the cafeteria at the city hall where he worked. The collection took two years.

Ogawara commented that simply disposing of the chopsticks were a waste of perfectly good wood.

A man in Beijing with the same thought was once caught packaging and selling used chopsticks without any form of disinfection.

I prefer the boat idea.
 

Michelle Mazur, guest barfblogger: Risking your life for a meal?

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Most would shy away from fugu, or puffer fish, but the Japanese love it. The internal organs and skin of the puffer fish contain a deadly poison called tetradotoxin, which causes paralysis of the diaphragm and death due to respiratory failure. It must be prepared by licensed cooks in order to remove the poisonous areas. Though it’s a dangerous meal, it’s been eaten for centuries.

It’s not just that one-in-one thousand fish are poisonous; each fish comes packed with a dose of death if not properly prepared. Statistics from the Tokyo Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health indicate 20-44 incidents of fugu poisoning per year between 1996 and 2006 in the entire country, leading to 34-64 hospitalizations and 0-6 deaths per year, for an average fatality rate of 6.8%

Not only is it deadly, but fugu is costly. Most people consider it to have a weak taste, but Japanese gourmets will disagree. Chefs spend 7 to 8 years training in order to be certified to serve this treat.

An outbreak of E.coli in spinach or Salmonella in tomatoes leads to national recalls and mass consumer aversion as products and produce become stigmatized. Yet a fish that is positively poisonous is still sought out in countries like Japan and Taiwan. There is some speculation as to how popular fugu would be if it was known to be completely safe. Would there be a sharp decrease in demand for the dish, or would it continue to be a special meal?

The acceptance of fugu in Japanese culture is completely opposite of the Japanese attitude towards beef with BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) commonly known as mad cow disease. Any meat that is at risk for containing traces of BSE is immediately removed from the food supply. What is the difference between dying from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of BSE, and being poisoned by fish?

Whether it’s the taste of the fish or the thrill of knowing it could be the last meal, I plan to stick to salmon instead.
—
Michelle Mazur is a first-year veterinary student at Kansas State University, hailing from Wichita, Kansas.  She is an avid dog lover, a crafty seamstress, and a bit of a workaholic. She recently spent two weeks in Japan and took a lot of pictures of bathrooms.

Bathrooms in Japan

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Michelle Mazur has been working with me for several months. She’s starting vet school in the fall and came up with the cryptosporidium-in-pools infosheet.

Michelle just returned from two weeks in Japan. I asked her to take some pictures of Japanese hand washing facilities and the like. In her own words,

"I’m a bit embarrassed at how many pictures I took during the trip.  At first my group members made fun of me taking photos of bathrooms, but by the end of the trip they would walk out of the bathroom saying "Cool, Michelle, you’ve got to go in and take a picture of that awesome bathroom!"
 
Michelle’s photo odyessy is available at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27779935@N05/sets/72157605689172182/

Her commentary is quite funny.

Farmer’s vomit sickens 54 bystanders at hospital

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Police and hospital officials said 54 people were sickened at a Kumamoto Red Cross Hospital in Kumamoto, Japan, after inhaling toxic gas from the vomit of a 34-year-old farmer who had apparently swallowed an agricultural chemical to kill himself.

He vomited while undergoing treatment, generating toxic chlorine gas.

A total of 54 people near him, including doctors and patients, fell ill. Of them, 10 were admitted to hospitals including the Red Cross Hospital, while the 44 others who were not in serious condition are steadily recovering.

If you’re going to off yourself, try not to involve involve others.

It’s OK, no one died, says PR-type

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In a bizarrely inaccurate statement, Owen Roberts, a public relations-type for the University of Guelph in Canada, wrote in the local paper on Monday after his latest junket to a conference for agricultural journalists in Japan that,

"The Japanese government is trying to solve the food safety and self-sufficiency problems in one clean sweep by convincing consumers that the only safe food product is locally grown. Unfortunately they’ve experienced a few hiccups along the way — an E. coli outbreak in 1996, a foot and mouth problem in 2000, BSE in 2001, and an "inappropriate" food labelling problem in 2002.

"Even so, nobody in Japan ever died from any of these scares. So why are the Japanese so paranoid?"

Huh?

In the summer of 1996, over 9,500 Japanese, largely schoolchildren, were stricken with E. coli O157:H7 and 12 were killed, most likely linked to the consumption of raw radish sprouts.

In July, 2000, an outbreak of Staphylococcus aureu in Snow Brand milk sickened 14,700 after workers failed to clean factory pipes for weeks.

In Aug. 2002, five elderly patients died from E. coli O157:H7 linked to food served at a nursing home.

There have been dozens of other outbreaks of foodborne illness  in Japan — and in every other country — involving not only death but countless untold illnesses. Healthy skepticism seems warranted. Especially of PR-types.