Chicken Sushi: A Bad Blog Post
Recently I got this awful idea that viewing a photo of sushi made with raw chicken would be so cursed as to be funny. Even worse, I foolishly thought such a photo could not exist in the universe. I then imagined myself, despite having never made sushi in my life, creating this for my own amusement and immediately jumped to how I could produce such a photo without wasting food. Can you feed raw chicken purchased in America to a cat? (You probably shouldn't). What about the nori and rice, can they eat that? (Sure, in moderation). Maybe I could just bake the sushi roll, creating an even more cursed image, and choke it down myself? Will I come close to doing any of this? (Absolutely not).
I had decided that this was possibly the only good use for AI image generation before I even thought to find evidence of the stuff existing. It very much does! Chicken sashimi is on more than a few restaurant menus (mostly in Japan) and Twitter even freaked out about it in 2017. There are lots of gross photos to look through! I don't think I even laughed once looking at them!
So, here's a summary, from what I could gather:
- It appears to only be common in certain regions of Japan
- It's possible to make it safer, but that doesn't mean it's safe.
- It is reportedly similar to tuna sashimi, but more mild (boring)
So it's around, and probably not worth the risk. Clearly I've wasted your time. However, I found it entertaining to post-hoc dig up all the times corporate social media folks tried to use the idea of chicken sashimi to get Twitter users to yell at them, so the best I can offer you is a look at that. Newsweek and The Takeout did their journalistic best: told us where it is consumed, interviewed restauranteurs that served it, told us how the restuarants make sure the chicken is fresh and clean (but stressed the lack of safety anyway), interviewed some food safety experts, etc. And of course Anthony Bourdain beat them all to it before there was a Twitter to express outrage upon. Most of the rest are just out for low-effort clicks. Let's go to the timeline:
Hopefully the mini-freakout of 2017 is apparent, because that's what I want to talk about. Its origins are odd: a tweet from Food Network chef and frequent Chopped judge Marc Murphy kicked it off, but to this day the tweet itself only has 30 likes, and didn't even get ratioed (a rarity, I found). It appears that the same day Food & Wine published an article on it, providing a quote from an expert that appears new but mostly leaning on the excellent journalism done by Newsweek 4 years prior.
The clicks did not appear to come.
A week later, Food & Wine then tweeted out a 1 minute chicken sashimi info video to very little fanfare.
They then waited until September to try tweeting it again, and this time got the engagement they must've been looking for:
My God, it was even big enough for Buzzfeed to post about! I can only imagine how many new subscribers Food & Wine earned for their magazine that day!
The Takeout article was my favorite for its range of interviews and apparent ignorance of the Twitter outrage that occurred 10 months prior to its publishing date (it claimed to be inspired by workplace banter). It also linked to this blog post from The Mad Traveler, which was the nicest find from this entire rabbit hole. It's a post from 2013 that very much feels 2013, but gives the useful anecdote that even in Japan, when the author tried to order it the waitress hesitated, pointed at the word "sashimi" on the menu, then pointed at the fried chicken on the next page. Maybe this was just because he was clearly not Japanese, but hilariously when pressed she would not even confirm it was "delicious". It's a fun read, ending with the author making friends with a stranger while eating at the counter together and not getting sick.
That's all I guess. Is Food & Wine one of those grocery store checkout aisle magazines now? Will they collab with the Liver King?