Natto

Natto is a Japanese food. It is fermented soybeans. Sometimes we get it as part of our school lunch. It just looks like a small pack of brown beans, and you put this watery sauce on it (vinegar?) and stir really fast. This gives the natto a gooey film, roughly the consistency of mucus. But before any of this happens, I offer mine to the nearest student who will take it. This student becomes my new best friend, and I make sure to tell him or her in English for all to hear.

 Natto is officially my least favorite food of all time. It beats out liver and tripe. It is gooey and slimy (or neba neba in Japanese) and smells bad and tastes worse than it smells. The after taste is like an exceptionally original flavor of barf.

So you can imagine my disappointment this morning when I strayed from my usual breakfast and ate some store-bought sushi, half of which was of the natto variety. I should mention also that Japanese sushi uses a number of ingredients that we would not expect or use or see at home, among them egg, mushrooms, spinach, and lettuce. And natto. I wasn't looking too closely. I just felt like eating sushi. I thought the brown gloop might have been mushrooms, or some other mystery Japanese ingredient. But no. That was the most disgusting sushi I have ever eaten. The natto just overwhelmed all other tastes. But I faced my fate, and managed (barely) to eat it without gagging. On the plus side, I've heard that natto does marvelous things for your digestive system.

I should mention here that tofu is also made from fermented soy beans. But somewhere along the lines, something must have gone very very wrong for someone to have wound up with natto. It is notoriously disliked among foreigners. It would fail miserably as an export. I would not wish it upon anyone (except that it's really healthy, so I guess as an intravenous drip, it would be fine, except that the goo might clog your arteries). Only in Japan.

Only in Japan.