DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

Sushi : 1. Japanese meal of uncooked fish and ocean life.

2. Raw fish served in a variety of delicate and ornate portions.

At some undetermined time in Earth’s history someone somewhere got the brilliant idea that they could save an awful lot of time and trouble if they just avoided the cooking chores completely and ate the fish raw. To make the idea more palatable to others, they dressed up this raw fish in a variety of disguises and served it in different forms on decorative dishes of all kinds. Some even put the raw fish into little floating boats that rotated around a specially built table, which, if you think about it, is a funny way of returning the fish to the sea, though not really. Then someone else got the equally brilliant idea of opening up restaurants and charging exhorbitant amounts of money for the raw fish, served in miniscule proportions, and called such restaurants “sushi bars.” Sushi bars became wildly popular during the twentieth century, and all the best people frequented them, but we’re still unconvinced.