Chewing on food prejudices: Daring to eat sashimi, offal, and all the foods we were warned about

Growing up, sashimi and sushi were forbidden foods in my mother’s house.

Despite never having tried any of these Japanese staples – not even your ubiquitous salmon sashimi – my mum was unyielding in her belief that they were dangerous to eat. (And to be fair, there’s plenty of fishy business that can happen with raw fish.)

So it was only at 15, at the urging of a friend, that I lost my sushi virginity – to a California roll from a nondescript mall kiosk after school. The taste was fairly forgettable, but the scolding my mum dished out, on hearing of my sins, lasted longer.

When I came down with a sore throat the week after, she knew exactly where to pin the blame: “See lah, must be because of the sushi!”

Comparing food ‘firsts’ with friends over the years, I’ve come to realise that this parental suspicion about sushi isn’t too uncommon – at least among the late boomer-early Gen X circle of Singaporean Chinese parents.

Nor has sushi been the only food to bear the brunt of our well-meaning parents’ prejudices, sketchily reasoned but faithfully passed on out of love for their kids.

What sets these cultural ‘prejudices’ apart from common dislike of, say, the smell or taste? For me, it’s the way the foods in question are proclaimed dirty or dangerous – often without having made their acquaintance in the first place.

Much of it can be boiled down to the influx of cosmopolitan cuisines into our local melting pot, met with mistrust by a generation who didn’t have the chance – or the means – to be exposed to them early.

Naturally, much of it revolves around raw dishes as well. A friend recounts how her mother – though the one who taught her to eat every part of a pig from brains to trotters – refused to entertain the possibility of steak medium-rare.

Anything less than well-done, she was firm, would give them a stomach ache.

Oysters on the half-shell were squarely in her bad books too, because “they don’t wash them properly one”. Another friend’s mum was full of qualms about dairy – especially yoghurt, since “you don’t know if there could be bad bacteria inside also”.

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On the flip side, there’re the food prejudices which might be lumped together under the ‘traditional’ banner. Offal is one notorious contender.

While some millennials grew up savouring kway chap and tripe with parents and grandparents, many of us were instead taught that innards were unclean (“That’s where the shit goes through!”)

To this day, I can’t stir a raw yolk into my congee without feeling a thrill of unease; another friend, whose parents warned her away from the runny delights of Ya Kun’s soft-boiled eggs, now loves them in her twenties.

If we Singaporeans love to eat, just as interesting a part of the journey is what we learnt to love. Our parents’ quirky qualms about food that we digested as kids or defied as teens; the many delicious pleasures we came to late in life.

Every culture has its food prejudices; ours come steeped in the flavours of a swiftly globalizing society, and of a resulting generation gap in how and what we eat.

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We all have certain foods which make us nostalgic for mum’s cooking – my mum, for instance, made Fuzhou fishballs juicier than I’ve ever managed to find elsewhere.

But these days, as I venture further than ever from home in tastes, I find that each food frontier I cross reminds me fondly of her too.

Like tucking into a crispy skewer of bonjiri aka chicken butt, something she’d always poked fun at – why would anyone want to eat the shittiest part of a chicken, literally?

Turns out it’s pretty damn succulent. Or her horror if she saw me sitting down to an omakase dinner loaded with uni, otoro, and other raw gems. Some things are best left untold.

This article was first published in City Nomads.