i went to a wild halloween bash last week, in a japanese bar in hk where the food was served on a naked woman. you read about this stuff in the west but here its pretty common.
the highlight of the night was fugu fish shashimi style. as you know this is a highly toxic delicacy if not prepared by a master chef. you go into paralasys whilst still conscious and the best the docs can do is keep up your vitals and pump your stomach.
is it banned in merka? i dunno. anyway what they were also serving was vodka jello and some tonic made from snake venom and herbs to ‘counteract’ the fugu. IF and if the fugu was not halal 555. i took my chances, a wild night to be sure.
apart from a high and tingling in my extremities i had no side effects.
The reason fugu is dangerous and has to be prepared by a master chef is that after separating the poison gland from the meat (relatively easy) they put some of the poison back onto the meat and people eat it for the buzz they get from the poison. I once had some fugu sashimi and it was pretty boring fish. I understand that about 100 people per year die of fugu poisoning. I hope they died happy. I imagine if there were a known antidote, fugu restaurants would stock it and those 100 deaths wouldn’t happen.
Once my father and I went fishing off Barnegat Light in NJ and we caught some blowfish. I don’t suppose they were the same species, but the locals told us they were poisonous. But the pier we were fishing from had a fish cleaning station, a wooden basin with running water that drained into the sea. Hammered into the sink were a pair of nails and they explained that if we pulled the fish between the nails two filets would come off, one on each side, and they were safe to eat and the rest of the fish should be thrown away.
Are you sure about this? It’s my understanding that the numbness experienced from eating fugu is due to there being a small amount of toxin in the flesh itself, just from being in contact with the entrails, not from the chefs “putting some of the poison back”.
Fugu is safe when prepared by any chef licensed to process fugu. The chef needs to be able to identify different types of fugu, and know which organs in that type of fugu contain the toxin.
And fugu is not eaten for a “buzz”. I don’t know if people in HK do things differently, but in Japan it’s just a good white fish, suitable for nabe (hot pot), frying and sashimi. There is not enough toxin in the flesh to cause numbness, tingling or any other effect, and they definitely don’t add any toxin to it. If you do feel a tingling or numbness in your mouth after eating fugu (and are sure it’s not from the condiments - fugu sashimi is often served with momiji oroshi, i.e. grated daikon with hot pepper), you need to get to the emergency room and get your stomach pumped.
Where did you get that number? Wikipedia says 31 people in Japan died from fugu toxin between 1995 and 2005. That’s 3 a year. That’s just Japan, but there can’t be that many more in the rest of the world. Also, almost all of these deaths are from fugu prepared by amateurs (mostly recreational fishermen who caught and prepared it themselves).
The short is that the high numbers for fugu-related deaths come from studies published in the west in the early 70s. Unfortunately, the actual paper cited doesn’t appear to be online, so I can’t look it up, but it’s likely that these numbers were due to people eating fish they caught themselves in the post-war years.
For more recent data, you can look at this chart from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Between 2001 and 2009, annual fugu-related deaths were between 0 and 6, in pretty much all cases these were prepared by amateur or unlicensed cooks.
There are several sub-species of fugu, and the levels of tetrodoxin in various organs will vary from species to species. Hence part of the difficulty of preparing the fish: it’s not just important to make sure you don’t contaminate the edible parts, you also have to be able to identify the species and know what you can use.
