Mmmm parasites, my favs!
4 Likes
Yes. Unagi sushi comes to mind. It’s awesome stuff. It’s not eaten raw, though.
3 Likes
There is, indeed, too damn much avocado in American sushi. It takes careful looking to find varieties at Wegman’s that don’t have it. Weren’t we supposed to be having a shortage of avocado? If so, I think I’ve found the reason.
3 Likes
Unagi is the bacon of sushi. Sadly, my store stopped carrying it because of sustainability issues.
4 Likes
@orenwolf reboing
2 Likes
I’ve been living under the misconception that sushi does not contain raw fish and that if it has raw fish it’s called sashimi. But if these genuine-seeming Japanese people are to be trusted that’s not the case.
And now I want sushi for dinner
1 Like
Even including nigiri and 1 or 2 ingredient rolls, I have yet to find good NA sushi outside of Vancouver. SoCal was decent, but I haven’t been down in a while. Maybe they’ve caught up.
1 Like
The site’s name isn’t just “Boing”, you know.
3 Likes
Yeah, I’m in Vancouver (ish) and reading this article was surreal. Who puts mayonnaise in a sushi roll? Ew. Avocado is common in veggie rolls though.
edit: Though I’m betting the video producers intentionally chose ridiculous examples.
3 Likes
I was under the impression that sushi definitely required sushi rice and usually featured raw fish but doesn’t have to. Sashimi is simply raw fish (or sometimes other meat.)
ETA: I’m just repeating what’s already in the video aren’t I? Sorry, can’t watch it right now.
4 Likes
I have lived in Japan for over forty years but I cannot remember ever having seen unagi sushi, are you sure you don’t mean anago?
1 Like
Ooh ooh, can we do Texans watching what passes for Tex-Mex here in France after? (Spoiler alert: it’s dire!)
4 Likes
Definitely worthwhile pointing out the chop suey comparison. The Westernization of cuisine is very dependant on the availability of ingredients, and North America comes nowhere near the diversity and the discriminating tastes of the Tokyo fish market.
This whole video is a bit like a Japanese version of the ‘Where’s the Beef’ campaign, applied to sushi. The Japanese value highly the taste of their fish, and North American tastes have not been sufficiently developed. I would guess that much of the time, real fish is left out of the sushi because of economics more than varied taste differences.
1 Like
I would say none of the food shown here would be called Sushi in France too, Sushi would only be rice with vinegar with raw fish on top, and wasabi mustard in between if you spice it up a bit, but no rolls of any kind (maki usually), neither sashimi (only raw fish), neither any strange experiments like this (California rolls … even the name tells it’s false 
) would be called Sushi even by French not aware of Japanese culture 
The best pizza I’ve ever eaten was in Vietnam… Run by a Japanese bloke. Half the menu was ‘Japanese-style pizza’ the other half was Italian-style. It was all incredible.
Certainly the strangest food mash-up I’ve had though was a Japanese take on “tex-mex” in a small restaurant on a mountain in Japan. I had a curry and chorizo burrito!
4 Likes
I can only claim 20 years, and almost all in the US (and once at a restaurant in Ghangzhou), but they always used the unagi rendition of the word where I was. If I ever see it as anago, though, I’ll know what it means. Thanks for increasing my chances.
2 Likes
4 Likes
Anago is salt water eel, unagi is freshwater. In North America, it’s often served as a nigiri, but also as unagi donburi.
There’s quite an industry in farming the eels…
5 Likes
I think for many Americans the basic concept of rolling up something in rice and seaweed its what’s important. It’s like if we referred to pizza-flavored Hot Pockets as “pierogies”, or if any kind of vege-burger was considered “falafel.”
3 Likes
Shortage of water where avocados are grown, may result in shortage of avocados, eventually, I guess.
Dunno where US gets its avocados from but this is scary for UK consumers (if they knew, and if they cared).
Two thousand litres of water are needed to produce just one kilo of avocados – four times the amount needed to produce a kilo of oranges, and 10 times what is needed to produce a kilo of tomatoes, according to the Water Footprint Network.
1 Like
