SASHIMI and ARROGANCE
At what point did we get so arrogant?
The financial industry abandons long held practices and begins unchecked avariciousness. The next thing we know, millions of people lose trillions of dollars and we are in a re
cession.
The mighty captains of industry decide to eliminate decades long social and culture legislation by moving factories where cheap labor and lack over sight are plentiful The result? Toys laced with lead, dog food that is deadly and sundry other shoddy products.
There are other examples. Some will say it is because we have become godless. Others will say the marketing geniuses have sold us a bunch of hooey. The Frugal Yankee wonders, when did we get so arrogant as to forget the lessons of the past, as if we were somehow smarter?
Here’s another example.
The foodies of the world decided age old ideas about eating raw fish is way too passé. The sushi fad takes over. It is made to sound high class even though the country of origin believes sushi is sort of the MacD
onald’s of eating. And now it gets worse.
It is called a tapeworm. Most of the time, one ingests this baby while eating raw fish. This wonderful creation slithers down your gullet and sets up domestication in the lower intestines. There it feeds off of passing nutrients causing abdominal pain, diarrhea and other fun discomforts. Eventually, the long flat critter makes an appearance from where all intestinal matter sees the light of day. You get rid of it in the toilet, that’s a delightful image. These babies can get yards long. Recently one Chicago man passed a tapeworm that was nine feet long. Nine feet?! Yowzer! Tapeworms have been known to grow to 40 feet. Double yowzer! With Japan reporting a dramatic increase in tapeworm cases and with yuppies having a yen sashimi and ceviche, the prognosis for more tape worm growth is expected.
The critter’s name is Diphyllobothrium nihonkaiense and the thought of a critter that big growing and eating in my bowels is not a pleasant thought. But didn’t our mothers tell us many moons ago that eating raw fish and raw meat was not a very good idea? So the question is asked again? When did we get so arrogant as to ignore history and sound advice? Perhaps it is time to remember moms words before we embark on a new direction or fad.
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The Frugal Yankee is opinionated, smart & down thrifty. He is a regular on NE Cable News, NH Public Radio as well as a columnist on Gather.com. The FrugalYankee.com web site is loaded with tips and ideas on how to save money and still enjoy life.
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Filed under: Commentary, Food | 11 Comments
Tags: sushi, tapeworms
THE FRUGAL YANKEE 
no author name, makes me wonder if this person knows that they are an idiot and does not want anyone to know who it is that is writing this nonsense, or do they own a steak joint and is competing with a sushi restaurant across the street. All, I mean all, of the raw fish that is sold in the US to be eaten raw has been frozen before service. This kills all bacteria and parasites within the fish before it is eaten. Most tape worm comes from uncooked or undercooked meat like cow, not raw fish. Raw fish has been in the japanese culture for centuries and is now a world wide craze due to its healthy and tasteful appeal. problems occur when the chef allows the fish to sit out or unfrozen for too long resulting in a type of food poisoning, not tape worm. do more research before you write such nonsense for naive folks that may want to try or already love sushi and raw fish. most of my friends are sushi lovers as well as myself and not one of those people have ever had a tape worm from fresh raw fish and never will.
Christian, your comment was published even though your criticism is based on some spurious information. I suggest you read Trevor Corson’s THE STORY OF SUSHI which among many things, belies the thrust of your arguments.
The source for this article was generated by reports in several newspapers and magazines regarding an increasing number of Americans getting tapeworms, with sushi eating, and some subsequent lawsuits, being blamed. This was followed up by research, including reading Mr. Corson’s book.
There are many good reasons for people not to eat raw food, especially when the source is never truly known. Belittling this article by questioning the motivations of the author without examination is a problem for far too many internet bloggers and writers. If you disagree with them, insult them.
As far as the author, the author is the Frugal Yankee.
To Furgal Yankee:
Although the previous commenter made some jokes about the author of the article owning a steak joint he also brought up plenty of facts that contradict your article, this was met with lawsuits of ambiguous purpose and someones book, which depending on the person and their experiences, could be complete b.s.
Furthermore you play it off as if all raw fish is automatically filled with parasites and diseases and they are never frozen or purified in any way, if that were true I would be dead now. Since I am sending you this message, alive and well, I think I proved my point.
And you are still an ignorant asshole. no matter how many times you don’t publish my comments.
The above commenter left an expletive laden comment which was never posted due to the profanity. It displayed poor judgment and bad manners. The above comment was this person’s response to being deleted.
Swearing and calling people names is usually a sign of an untrained, angry mind. Winning an argument by shouting someone down is for children in a schoolyard.? Why yell and scream at someone they don’t know? These cannot be the manners a mother gives her child? Besides, no one ever do this in person. Imagine if this was done in a bar?
The topic was a report on how tapeworms were showing up in sushi. The basic thesis was ‘watch out’, uncooked food can be dangerous. As someone who has read and interviewed Trevor Corson on his book THE ZEN OF SUSHI, the concerns of food contamination may be over blown, but not worthy of expletives and name calling. Mr. Shflasdhf, as my mother used to say, “grow up”.
studies show you can get skin cancer by being in the sun, so we should avoid it like the plague. who cares? people want to eat raw food then let them. im going to go get some sashami right now, then eat a haunch of raw meat from the grocery store. unlike you underdeveloped mongrels, my appendix is still functioning at full throttle.
It’s amazing. People who would never insult someone if there were talking in a bar feel empowered enough to do so when anonymous & shielded by computers. Hmm, what does that say? In any event, after the above person eats his red meat & sashimi, they will continue to suffer from acute indiscretion.
Your arguments against eating sashimi are very poor. Raw fish is perfectly safe to eat, if you take the proper precautions. Plenty of fish are completely safe to eat raw as is, and others (especially river fish) need to be frozen first. The only logical argument against eating sashimi is that some sushi restaurants don’t prepare their fish correctly. But, every time you walk into a restaurant, you take the risk of getting a food-borne illness because that restaurant, whatever type it might be, didn’t prepare their food correctly. So, this isn’t a very good argument either, as it turns out. Or, it’s an argument against eating in restaurants altogether, which seems a bit absurd on the face of it. If you’re this paranoid about what you eat, you can always make sashimi at home, and have it be perfectly, 100% safe.
But, if you are avoiding sushi restaurants because of some perceived risk of getting a tapeworm, in order to be logically consistent, then you should avoid all activities with a higher risk than eating sashimi. Considering millions of people eat sashimi every year, regularly, and there are only a very few cases of it reported annually, and that a tapeworm isn’t life-threatening, and is easily treated, you should probably never leave the house, because almost everything you do outside of your home is more dangerous than this. Driving your car in fact poses both a far more likely and far more severe risk each time you do it. You chance death each and every time, and your chances of being killed are far greater than your chances of getting a tapeworm from eating sashimi.
People are very bad at gauging risk. You see big scares about eating undercooked burgers because of salmonella, when the chances are much slimmer than getting a heart attack because people eat too many cheeseburgers. But what do they do? They make sure that burger is cooked to death, and then they melt cheese and put bacon on it, and eat it anyway. It’d be a lot safer to have a delicious medium rare burger pink in the middle, and just do it less often.
You’re fairly likely to die of a heart attack. If that doesn’t get you, cancer probably will. If not, you’ll probably be killed in a car wreck. You probably won’t, however, get a tapeworm from eating sashimi. So, eat fewer cheeseburgers, don’t smoke, and maybe get a safer car, and enjoy some sashimi.
Thank you for your well constructed thoughts, and I agree with much of it. The germ for the article centered around how it has gotten so popular and how safety issues were slipping resulting in some illness. One central thought running through the frugal Yankee’s mind is how we place trust in institutions, and those same institutions are not necessarily well motivated.
The picture of the xray in the above article is a fake. First of all, a tapeworm is an invertebrate (Phylum Platyhelminthes) and therefore has no vertebral column (no bones at all, for that matter). Second, the snake in the picture doesn’t even follow the path of the digestive system. It must have been laid on top of the person in the xray or photo-shopped in.
woh, I like to eat the delicious……!?