| A Toast to Local Food |
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Oishii!
Stated with enthusiasm, this is a sort of toast to good food in Japan.
We have had plenty of occasions to use the expression, though we are not always sure what we are toasting. |
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Our two-day tour of farms, a market and a sake brewery was filled with tradition. But it started even before we got on the bus.
The hotel in Tokyo that we stayed in the night before had a breakfast buffet with Western and Japanese food. On the Western side, eggs, bacon, spaghetti with red sauce (for real). In the Japanese corner, rice, miso soup, seaweed, vegetables and more. It was all labeled, and everything we tried was excellent.
On the tour, we stayed at a sort of inn or lodge in a small village. We left our shoes and everything else recognizable at the door. We slept in small rooms on futons (short for ‘hard as a rock’) on the floor. A communal shower also had a big communal hot bath.
We ate kneeling on pillows at low tables. At dinner there was great pride in the local food they served.
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Urgenci >
KOBE 2010 > AN AMERICAN DIARY > A Toast to Local Food |
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But first: dinner speeches. These take some time, since the speakers (the mayor, the sake brewer, and several more) spoke Japanese, which is translated to English and finally to French. URGENCI started in France, and French remains one of the official languages of the symposium.
It is all ‘family style.’ Huge bowls of steaming chicken and vegetables, small plates and bowls of vegetables, tempeh, nori rolls (going by some other name), big serving dishes holding skewered pork, chicken, fruit, sushi, and more. The food is presented almost as a work of art.
We are grateful for two things at the outset: we know how to use chopsticks, so we can wave off the forks offered to us Westerners. And we are sitting near a gregarious Japanese man who wants to explain everything (but knows only a bit of English) and a French woman who knows Japanese, so we can find out what he is saying.
Soon we know what most of the food is and we are shown how to eat or serve it. We learn that the stringy little items that look for all the world like a fried red worms (which seems plausible) are mushrooms, and very tasty. We learn about the big chunks of boiled daikon. The vegetables are identified one by one.
It is a fine party, raucous with conversation and laughter. We practice the custom of never filling your own glass of beer or sake: it is bad manners. But it is equally bad manners for your neighbor to let your glass get too low.
“Kanpei!” [cheers] |
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