Natto… d’oh!

Today, a short story about natto (nah-toe)

Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The black goat of the woods with a thousand… er, sorry.  This is natto.  Pic swiped from Wikipedia…

 

              Natto is one of the great “Foreigner Joke Foods” of Japan.  A Foreigner Joke Food, or FJF, is a food item that is not really eaten by anyone, but exists merely to test the mettle of visiting foreigners.  Other examples from around the world include Vegemite (that great black vegetable paste from Australia), salmiak (the wonderful ammonium-chloride spiked black licorice from Scandanavia / Continental Europe), lutefisk (fish and lye… mmmm… from our friends in Norway) and perhaps the “slider” hamburger in the USA.

 

              I’m kidding, of course.  Natto is a healthy, nutritious, low-calorie food item.  Also, somebody somewhere might actually find it palatable.  Maybe. 

              Natto is made from fermented soybeans.  Like yogurt, cheese, and potato chips, it probably started as a mistake.  Like yogurt, it has lots of beneficial bacteria.  Natto has the consistency of chunky snot, stinks to high heaven, and produces little sticky streamers that snap off and adhere to everything.  You can mix it with vegetables, tofu, and / or mustard (a waste of perfectly good vegetables, tofu, and condiments IMHO) or eat it straight.  

 

              If you lack a Japanese grocery store near your home, you can approximate the experience of natto with the following handy recipe:

 

Jeff’s Not-Natto Simulation

 

Directions:  Take a week-old pair of gym socks, ball them up and insert them into your ripest, most unbearable pair of sneakers.  Soak the sneaker / sock combo in bog water for a week.  Retain the resulting liquid and boil it until reduced to a paste.  Mix with liberal amounts of white glue.  Pour over chunky stuff.  Take a deep whiff.  Yum?

 

               Yes, the closest olfactory analog to natto is old shoes and sweaty socks.  What makes it worse than that?  It tastes as bad as it smells.  What makes it even worse than that?  The texture is indescribably uncomfortable.  Imagine eating a giant plate of moist toenail fungus (okay, okay, I’ll stop.  I hope no one is reading this over lunch or dinner).   

             

              So there I was, one day last week, with natto looming on the school lunch menu.  I wasn’t looking forward to it.  I was dreading it, in fact.  But I would be tough.  I would eat it and like it and NOT be a wimpy foreigner!

 

              The day arrived.  I eat with my students, rotating classes every week.  However, instead of serving myself with the students, I pick up my lunch from the teacher’s room, where the lunch lady doles out the portions for the teachers.  Seeing as how I’m a giant foreigner-type thing, the lunch lady assumes I eat approximately thirty-seven times as much as the average human.  Thus, I went to grab my tray… and there it was.  A veritable mountain of natto, staring at me like something out of one of H.P. Lovecraft’s more twisted fever-dreams.  I grinned gamely and picked up my tray.  That day, of course, the principal, assistant principal, head teacher, and head administrator were all sitting up front in the office and watched me go past. 

             

              “Hey, Jeff.”  The principal asked me, “Can you eat natto?”

              Ah, the dreaded challenge of the FJF, thrown right in my face!  I picked up the proffered hankie.

              “Yes.”  I replied, confidently.  A chuckle went through the room. 

              I exited the office and immediately ducked off to the side, where they couldn’t see me through the window, and made a beeline to the lunch cart.  I opened the natto tray (the containers sit on the cart to receive leftovers) and shoveled in two giant gobs of the stuff (hey, I said I would eat it, just not a Mount Fuji-sized portion of it)…

              Then my students came out of their classroom just down the hall and saw me.  They called to me.  I was caught.  I couldn’t get rid of any more of it without appearing to cheat.

 

              So I took what I had left over (still considerably more than the typical student portion) and strode to class 3A. 

              I sat down.  Lunch began.  I took a dollop of the stuff (trailing streamers of eldritch goo), placed it on my rice, picked up the dollop of natto with an equal-sized dollop of rice, and placed it in my mouth… and found myself magically transported back to junior high school.  No, not the lunch room… the gym.  Specifically, the locker room, at the end of a summer’s day…

             

              Yuck. 

              I swallowed three mouthfuls like this. I then decided to thoroughly wimp out, because I figured it was much better to swallow my pride than to spew in front of half of my third-year students.  Speaking of whom, every single last student in my group were eating theirs with no complaints.  Maybe it’s not a FJF after all… in any case, I was chagrined and defeated and all that, and ashamed of my earlier bravado. 

             

              So I ate everything else, all the while recalling and utilizing every trick I learned in kindergarten to make it seem like I ate more of my yucky food than I actually did.  I compacted and piled the natto.  I strategically placed my rice bowl on my natto plate so that it hid most of it.  I was safe… now to slip out and hit the cart on the way back to the office…

              …and there went the cart, being wheeled down the hallway.  Seems lunch ran a bit long in this class, and my perfect getaway had left without me…

              So I was first up at the front of the class, using their cart… while the students busied themselves getting their desks in order, I rushed to the front.  One flick of the wrist later and the evidence was gone, anonymously deposited in the leftovers receptacle.         

              I was free. 

             

              Until the next time they serve natto, of course…