ninme

They should have published this yesterday. Ah well, it makes sense in the official (American) launch of the holiday season:

The Times - Bits of dancing rubber. Delicious!
The Japanese really know how to eat, unlike our feeble and often solitary attempts, by Ben Macintyre

The Japanese know how to eat, and how to relate to food, in a way that most cultures have long forgotten: as an intellectual and aesthetic experience, as much as an exercise of the taste buds. This week the Michelin guide awarded a stunning 191 stars to restaurants in Tokyo, with no less than eight establishments winning the top accolade of three stars. Paris, by contrast, can boast only 98 stars in total; London, a mere 50.

A fascination with food is buried deep in Japan’s cultural make-up. Eating — even cheap, humble everyday nourishment — is taken seriously. There is an insatiable curiosity about food in Japan, a hunger to explore the intricacies of flavour, texture and colour, an insistence on freshness and seasonality, a willingness to adapt and adopt other culinary cultures. Tokyo has at least 200,000 places to eat, or one for every 45 people.

In Britain, food has improved over the past two decades, but too often we pay ludicrously high prices to eat gussied-up celebrity food, or convince ourselves we are eating well just because the local pub now calls itself a gastropub. Mostly we eat rubbish, snarfing down high-calorie, ready-cooked chum, wordlessly, eyes glued to the television. A worrying (and growing) number of Britons choose to eat alone.

Humans were not meant to eat this way. We treat food differently from any other species: we share it, eat it in public and make eye contact while eating; we eat certain foods at certain times of day, and on ritual occasions…

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that cooking and eating represented the very origin of human cultural development: once Homo sapiens could develop co-operative food strategies, and explore different ways of preparing his nourishment, then language could develop, the first dinner-party conversation around the camp fire could begin. Cooking made food more digestible and broke down toxins, but it was also an act of creativity and imagination. It ceased to be merely the necessary means to keep man alive.

Some in the West find the manner of Japanese eating off-putting: the brittle perfection, the formality, the obsessive attention to detail in order to produce something that seems so simple, the taste for the obscure and unlikely, such as snapper sperm sacs or lethal fish.

Yet the imaginative, interested and collective Japanese way of eating is surely far closer to the way humans ought to — and used to — share food than our own willingness to eat identical, poor-quality hamburgers in identical plastic wrapping, alone and unspeaking. Sharing a meal — the peculiar behaviour so central to the development of culture and society — is about conversation and ritual, exchanging ideas, experimenting with colour, taste and arrangement. It should not be simply about slaking a hunger.

Sounds just like my dinner last night! I even made rolls coloured with pumpkin so they came out a festive orange! Where’s Michelin when you need them, eh?