Last night I saw an episode of The Iron Chef that shocked and disturbed me. I assume everyone is familiar with the structure of the show, in that one main ingredient is chosen and both the challenger and the Iron Chef have one hour to create a whole meal where each course uses the chosen ingredient prominently. Normally the main ingredient is something normal like beans, mushrooms, or fish, and by "normal" I of course mean "not currently alive". Well last night's main ingredient of "octopus" was definitely alive, and in fact when the tank of live octopi was unveiled, one of them literally jumped out of the tank and onto the floor of Kitchen Stadium. Then, the chefs each chose a few octopi to be a part of their dishes and proceeded to start dicing them up while the creatures were still alive. The tentacles continued to twitch even after the head was gone, and in many cases the tentacles continued to twitch and move around even after being cooked for a short time in hot water. I have enough trouble cooking food that is dead, I can't imagine adding ingredients to a pot and watching them crawl around under their own power.

But the positive note to all this is that both chefs cooked the octopi, which is more than I can say for many Asian fish-related dishes. Apparently, somewhere down the line while we Americans discovered things like botulism and other such food-bourne microbes, the Japanese culture discovered that "hmm...you don't always get sick when you eat uncooked fish". I would never, ever, become a vegetarian, for many reasons that I'll elaborate on in a different post someday, but if I took the lid off a tray of seafood and discovered a row of shrimp staring at me through dead eyes and a grouper with its mouth gaping open then I would probably be tempted to grab the nearest tofu and run. Man discovered fire many many thousands of years ago, but apparently the East-Asian subcontinent is a little behind the times.

And once they master fire, they can move on to the other great discovery of the past few millennia: utensils.