Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Before I start this article, I’d just like to say what an AMAZING first month the new Non-Fried Yongfook.com Now With More Glurm has seen. Thanks to some nice press reviews from places such as USA Today, Canada.com, Yahoo and the Straits Times, I’ve had more visitors than ever before - yongfook.com saw a jump from about 300 to 400 visits a day to getting over 2000 visits on some days in January. My stats page recorded almost 30′000 visits in the month of January, from over 22′000 different users (which weighed in at over 1′000′000 hits!). So a big thank you to all the old yongfook.com readers who came back after my little break, and a big welcome to all the new folk. May you all enjoy sucking upon my sugary teats of happiness.

Anyway, I’d like to introduce you to the nemesis. The Unicron amongst all the other insignificant Autobots and Decepticons of the Japanese food universe, that has the power to destroy everything, ever, with its real and ultimate power. Out of all the delightfully disgusting foods that Japan has to offer such as fish ovaries and cats made from dogs, THIS is the one where even most plucky “I’ll eat anything, me” foreigners have to put their foot down and declare this country completely arse bananas insane beyond all hope. It is the food that breaches even the most hardy of experimentalist’s puke threshold. The food that is so disgusting my house devalued by 18% just by opening a pack in my kitchen. The food that just watching someone ELSE eat can make you dry wretch uncontrollably until your throat explodes with the force of a thousand suns.

This is nattou.

In basic terms, nattou is fermented soy beans. Little beans in a little pack which are eaten under the pretence that they are packed full of all sorts of vitamins and natural antibodies.

Unfortunately, much in the same way a poisonous frog or caterpillar will be brightly coloured to warn predators not to accidentally eat them and suffer a long agonising death, nature provides similar health warnings for food that isn’t fit for human consumption, and in nattou’s case the subtle clue by which humankind should be able to decipher that we are never ever to put this in our mouths is that it smells - overwhelmingly - of SHIT.

I certainly don’t doubt that nattou has extremely high health benefits, seeing as it is so vile that I imagine simply by dropping a pack into the sea you can kill a fully grown humpback whale hundreds of miles away, its perfectly plausible that just by eating a single bean some tiny little virus in my body will be CRUSHED within seconds.

And remember that nattou is fermented - that is, in layman’s terms, ROTTEN - which means this natural goodness is all wrapped up in a physical form that resembles the still-damp droppings of a rabbit with some kind of horrific tropical disease. Naturally, with the foul stench and appearance of faeces comes a taste that some would refer to as “acquired” whilst others might say “ARRRG WHAT THE FRICK HAVE I EATEN”, before pouring scalding hot water into their eyes to distract from the cacophony of evil inside their mouth.

But then, the same goes for nearly all fermented foods, in my opinion. If there is one type of person I have never been able to fully understand, it is cheese-eaters, neatly including by way of blanket stereotype, the French. Veering off to a side-track for a moment, like a child taking his first ride in a bumper car and driving instinctively straight towards a waving parent, I don’t think I have ever met a person who I could call 100% human, who at the same time was a big fan of cheese. Sure, I’ll eat pizza and maybe even quaff a cheeseburger when provoked with name-calling, but we all know that isn’t real cheese. REAL cheese, as cheese eaters and The French will tell you, are to be found at the very extremities of the boundaries of what animals can eat and not die. Real Cheese ™ is either going to be a hard lump of brittle, stinking, fetid wax that has all the appeal of some horrific but unpublished HP Lovecraft monster made entirely of the smegma collected from dead lepers, or a slimy, near-liquid mess of moulded fluff with the occasional nugget of solid matter that was once upon a time something you could look upon and not instantly believe the world was coming to an end on your plate. Nattou is very much like the Japanese equivalent of the latter.

This adds another tally to Japan’s already fairly grim-looking list of foods that required no effort to make (sashimi is just fricking fish, folks), nattou effectively being beans chucked in a barrel and left alone until someone happens to remember, or develops an exciting new lung disease from the smell.

Appearance Nattou looks like brown, moist beans and at first don’t appear all that bad until you MAKE THE MISTAKE OF MOVING THEM. Yes, because by stirring the pack or picking up a clump of the beans with chopsticks you unleash the strings. The filthy, decaying tentacles of bean plasma that hold this disgusting mess together like glue. There are also two types of nattou, effectively “bean” nattou and “hey, we mushed up the beans for you!” nattou. Both look equally bad. 1/5

Taste/Smell Heres the shocker - nattou doesn’t actually taste completely awful. In fact, if you try really hard, there is a very slight hint of baked bean in there (minus the tomato flavour. so, just bean flavour, really) with a kind of subtle nutty-cheese aftertaste. Also only the foolhardy eat nattou just on its own - doused in a selection of other condiments (sesame oil, chopped chives, egg yolk - all of which are perfectly legitimate and widely accepted nattou additives that I haven’t just made up with my brain) you could almost call it palatable. However none of this really does anything to mask the smell, which remains pungent and turd-like to the very last string, piercing through however much oil you drown them in like the worlds most effective shit-scented detergent. I really want to give nattou a chance here and award it 2/5 in this category. But I won’t. Frick you, nattou. 1/5

Fear Factor This is the most fear that can be put on a plate, bar being forced to eat your first-born child whilst jumping out of a plane with a curiously anvil-shaped parachute bag. 5/5

Health Implications The irony! Nattou is FULL of various health benefits that the majority of the world will never reap as I’d rather die young and enjoy my food. Here’s what wikipedia has to say about the health benefits of nattou.

Final Rating: 1/5. The power of Christ compels you. The power of Christ compels you.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2005 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Food Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.