The Fatal Meal

From blowfish to blue cheese, Western diners have become obsessed with the (often exaggerated) idea that our meals might destroy us — even though the act of eating has been perilous for most of human history.

- Ligaya Mishan

THERE IS A PLATE of fish cut so thin you can half see through it, the pale panels arrayed in rings that ripple outward, like the small, concentrically packed florets of a chrysanthemum. To one diner, this is a promise of pleasure; to another, a teetering on the abyss. Westerners have never quite understood the reverence in Japan for fugu, alternately known in English as puffer fish, globefish or blowfish, of the family Tetraodontidae. A sluggish swimmer, fugu has stunted fins and often flat-lying spikes instead of scales, and when confronted by predators it compensates for its lack of speed by swallowing enough water to swell up until its spikes stand on end, so it looks like an angry armored balloon. Among those who think of fugu as merely a distant delicacy, knowledge rarely goes beyond the fish’s infamous trait: In the most delicious species, the innards are suffused with the neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin (TTX). In high enough doses, this can shut down a diner’s nerve impulses and cause, within hours, nausea, paralysis and the stalling of the heart, which only knows to beat because our body’s electrical system tells it to.