Sushi Gone Wrong

What is the world’s preoccupation with Sushi?  My daughter’s friends insisted on going to a Sushi Bar Saturday night, in Nashville of all places.  Nashville is known for Honky Tonk Bars and Patsy Cline.  There aren’t a whole lot of private jets flying into our international hub, so they can visit our legendary sushi bars.  Despite this obvious fact this group of hipsters wants to do the rad thing, if “rad” is still a word, and hang at the local Sushi Bar.

When I hear the word Sushi I hear the words raw meat prepared by immigrants carrying unfamiliar bacteria to a foreign ecosystem and risking an epidemic of mammoth proportions. Sure it sounds complicated.  It’s not. 

As a mother I developed a new power of replacing single words with fantastic, paranoid, dreamscapes that cannot be easily linked to reality.  It’s true.  I once sensed a germ being carried three isles over from the freezer section at Kroger and inhaled by my unsuspecting daughter.  It transpired in seconds.  There was nothing that could be done but stand and shudder over this invisible viper attacking our air space.  Sure enough, as I had predicted, my daughter was diagnosed with H1N1 five days later.  Coincidence?  I think not.

Now I’m being faced with the Sushi dilemma I knew would come one day.  I sprung into emergency mode and Googled the word Sushi only to find a bunch of poison pushing articles proclaiming the wonders of raw seafood.  It was incredibly condescending crap like, “FUN FACTS ABOUT SUSHI” and “FEAST WITH SUSHI”.  Let me tell you something.  There is nothing remotely funny about skinning Flipper and rolling it into slimy sea greens for my baby to eat.  Seeing I was up against a wide canvas of Sushi loving influence which grew to levels exceeding the authority of the NRA, I scrapped Google.

When it comes to your children you need to go for the throat.  Therefore, I went right for the bottom line, the big game, the nitty-gritty, the dead body in the trunk.  That’s right, the Health Score.  Unfortunately, the restaurant they were visiting had no score for this month.  On the upside of things I did find Gippy’s Deli to have a score of 38 last week.  It didn’t solve my predicament but certainly explained the drastic weight loss and rash on my upper torso.

In the end, I was able to convince my daughter to eat the noodles or soup on the menu, and to save the Sushi experience for a big city where the health codes are little stricter.  She was happy she heeded my advice until the next morning.  Apparently the noodles she chose to eat were especially spicy and set off an episode with her peptic ulcer (A condition which is caused by continual stress.  No doubt her father’s doing), and can be exacerbated by peppery foods.  Who told her to eat peppery food?  Noodles!  I said, “Noodles”.

Oh well, that’s the truth as I know it today.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.  ~William James