Learning to glo

Cool: the other day Anthony Bourdain retweeted some of my sushi etiquette tips. Inevitable: amidst many positive responses, I got some others suggesting that perhaps such attention to detail was a tad elitist. Irony: I totally sympathize.

Food snobbery is exactly what I was hoping to avoid when I decided to focus my book The Story of Sushi on a motley crew of American sushi apprentices in L.A., rather than penning a hagiography of, say, Masa. (Though in the book I do, of course, delve deeply into the Japanese sushi tradition.)

On the other hand, researching the book made it clear to me how much is wrong with our day-to-day sushi, especially in America. And when I say wrong, the first thing I’m worried about is our health. And then there’s the health of the ecosystems that provide our fish.

My sushi-eating tips, and the educational dinners I host, are partly intended to help people get a more delicious and authentic meal, yes. But they’re also intended to help us avoid crap sushi that could make us unhealthy—there’s a lot of crap sushi out there these days—as well as take more care in the consumption of the oceans’ fast-disappearing sea creatures. Most of us don’t realize, for example, that all that wasabi and soy sauce and all those spicy rolls are there for a specific purpose—to prevent us from tasting fish that’s subpar or past its prime.

Here I have to give a shout out to Lucky Peach, the new food magazine from David Chang and McSweeney’s. The current issue, titled “American Food,” contains a graphic spread by cartoonist Lauren Weinstein that features some of the juiciest scary facts I covered in The Story of Sushi  about the origins of your typical sushi fish and turns them into an info-graphic called “Sushi, USA” that is not to be missed. This is why I insist on working with a traditionally trained, old-school sushi chef who’s been at it for thirty years.

Below is a snippet of the cartoon spread—look for the magazine at your newsstand or bookstore.

Telling the kid that it is very brave of them to come forward and admit that they did something wrong.

Having a conversation to find out why they did the bad thing. Sometimes there’s an underlying reason that needs to be addressed like ‘I’m worried the other kids think I’m not cool enough so I broke a rule’ or ‘I was mad at my sister because she called me fat so I broke her toy’, etc. These conversations might be more important than the bad thing.

Telling the kid that we all make bad decisions sometimes and while we should try not to do that again, making a bad decision doesn’t mean we’re bad forever.

Telling the kid that the best way to feel less bad about it is to try to make things right. Did they secretly take mom’s piece of cake? Maybe we can go bake a new piece of cake together and give it to mom. (The point here is not to make the kid really produce something of equal value to what they stole/broke/etc. A child often can not do that. The point is to practice what fixing the damage you have done looks like).

I think there is also… when “being bad” is always understood in terms of a thing that a person with less power does and the response is punishment (or something that isn’t exactly punishment but is meant to make the less powerful person feel bad, like a scolding) that reinforces the idea that morality is tied to power and obeying authority.

So I like this script but want to add that I think the #1 thing grown-ups can do to encourage kids to have a restorative justice or w/e attitude to having done something wrong, is to be transparent about when THEY mess up or have conflicts with peers (or conflicts with people who have more power) so that kids can see what assessing wrongdoing can look like when getting an authority figure to assign punishment isn’t an option.

Time shifting

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Anne Carson (2009)

Arthur S. Way (1898)

George Theodoridis (2010)

Ian C. Johnston (2010)

E.P. Coleridge (1910)

Theodore Alois Buckley (1892)

John Peck, Frank Nisetich (1995)

R. Potter (1906)

M. L. West (1987)

William Arrowsmith (1958)

Philip Vellacott (1972)

Michael Wodhull (1782)

Kenneth McLeish (1997)

David Kovacs (2002)

Andrew Wilson (1993)

Nocturne, Li-Young Lee

Your Name, Vahan Tekeyan

Sonnets to Orpheus 2;29, Rainer Maria Rilke

I stopped going to therapy, Clementine von Radics

Miyazaki Bloom, Nina Mingya Powles  

The Quiet Machine, Ada Limón

When we two parted, Lord Byron

Fragment, Amy Lowell

The Want of You, Angelina Weld Grimké

When Did It Happen?, Mary Oliver

Alone, Sara Teasdale

Ratatouille (2021)

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