Out There

Ankimo, a silken Japanese small-dish prepared from the scarce monkfish's hefty liver, gives up a rich, accordioned delight that we usually associate with love or art and rarely with death. First, there's the elegance of its miniature presentation. Then, with the slightest pressure between mouth and tongue, the steamed morsel becomes something neither liquid nor solid and takes hold in two places at once: your fragrance-poised inner nose, and your texture- and temperature-sensitive mouth, which is beginning to be fretful about when the luscious visitor will vanish.

As you fear, without warning, it melts and is gone ... to be replaced by a quiet, ghostly version of itself (a pedestrian term, aftertaste), which, if you don't nullify the process with a bite of something else, joins with the brand-new brawny memory of your first, swooning impression. Those two sensory partners will circle and circle, moving ever farther away, until in a day or two they leave behind nothing but words such as these.

I can only imagine that the potentially fatal liver of the blimpy blowfish, fugu, makes ankimo seem like tinned sardine. (Actually, I love certain brands of sardines and believe the modest fellows possess a formidable pleasure-soul.) Fugu liver has been described in gastronomical terms so hyperbolic that it leads anyone to question my constant assertion that serious pleasures are found in frivolous places. There's nothing frivolous here.

Japanese Roulette

You know fugu: it's Japanese roulette. When caught wild and not properly butchered (can you butcher fish?), the toxin in blowfish, especially in the reportedly delectable liver, will paralyze you and, with all your senses still active and screaming, retard and then halt your breathing and heartbeat. Imagine yourself as a pallid star in some Poe-pretending Hammer film, with a queeny Vincent Price gloating over your motionless demise.

Not all fugu has the same amount of toxin, and licensed chefs in Japan gain reputation through their skill in purifying the beast, especially the toxin-riddled liver, occasionally leaving just enough poison to create the sought-after tingling of the lips. But accidents will happen. In 1975, a fugu treat killed kabuki actor and gourmand Bando Mitsugoro VIII, who until that moment had been a "living national treasure." What a ruckus, national art murdered by national novelty. Sale of fugu liver was henceforth forbidden, which made its macho charm all the more potent.

You may have had your fugu memory refreshed by the news that it can be farmed in a manner that results in a toxin-free product, the poison being bred by what the fish eats. Because of this, old-time fugu masters have hit the ceiling, fearing that if risk is diluted, even the wild stuff will lose its social potency, and they their jobs.


Death by Theater

Restaurant critics are supposed to eat everything, even foods we may not like, but I have never eaten fugu liver, or the safer fugu sashimi -- and both have been listed on menus in my hands. Does that make me a culinary coward?

Hard to say: I was once almost done in by a Santa Monica curried oyster, and never forgot. There's risk in anything that goes into one's mouth, just as there's risk in whatever goes into one's mind. I had always thought that arts critics, especially theater critics, were cultural "king's tasters" or, even better, lifeguards (with a footlight tan) who would warn me of Broadway undertow. Really bad theater -- bad art of any kind -- can paralyze one's heart just as effectively as will an errant piece of liver. Yet Grease et alia do their damage slowly, without the thrill of personal jeopardy or any exceptional commensurate pleasure .

Relativists of the "I know what I like" breed may object to the bossy finality of critical judgment. But I have seen the harm done to those who have exposed themselves again and again to poorly trimmed theater and film scripts numbed by clichés, moldering musical warhorses, and cutesy, whatever's-available "thematic exhibitions" of art.

Should we critics continue to eat our fugu so that others may be safe? Yes, of course, but reviewing opportunities are fewer and fewer, just like wild fugu itself and its brave, though diminished, clientele. Most art, and criticism, fail not by taking risks, but by avoiding them. If we're not prepared to put ourselves on the line, we critics, and what we criticize, may just as well be farmed and neutered, too.

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Sure, a line from the lyrics -- "They have eyes, but they do not have faces" -- does link to the Franju film masterpiece, Eyes Without a Face, but that's another story. Boomers may also recall that potatoes do indeed have faces, male and female, if the dog hasn't eaten the plastic lips or mustache.

The video was used because, in case you didn't know, the United Nations has declared 2008 to be the International Year of the Potato. For some of us, every year is the year of the potato, but the U.N. honors the tuber now because the rice-wheat-maize cereal trinity is in trouble. Drought in Australia and marketing greed has left the developing world in a rice crisis. In the U.S., bakeries scrawl signs explaining that the elevated price of flour adds a buck a loaf; pizzerias are demanding four bits more a slice. Soybeans for fuel bump corn for feed. So someone in a moderately high place decided that what had been a naked commodity-trader fact should be dressed up and set on a cultural platform:

The world potato sector is undergoing major changes. Until the early 1990s, most potatoes were grown and consumed in Europe, North America and countries of the former Soviet Union. Since then, there has been a dramatic increase in potato production and demand in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where output rose from less than 30 million tonnes in the early 1960s to more than 165 million tonnes in 2007.

Therefore, potatoes are:

Food of the future. The International Year of the Potato is raising awareness of the key role played by the "humble tuber" in agriculture, the economy and world food security. But it also has a very practical aim: to promote development of sustainable potato-based systems that enhance the well-being of producers and consumers and help realize the potato's full potential as a "food of the future."

You'll never guess which country grows the most potatoes. Not the U.S. (fifth) or Russia (second). It's China. Are those spuds for McDonald's restaurants in Beijing, Shanghai? Partly, yes; more for export. But the un-yam is increasingly popular in inland Northern and Central China, used for recipes that make the most of the ingredient's long-treasured ability to straddle the flavor line between vehicle and passenger.

Potatoes are this year's rice.

My father, who seldom spoke about his Brooklyn yute, told me that he and his roughie pals each put a raw potato into a tin can in which holes had been punched and strings attached. Then they added a burning piece of coal (!) or wood and swung the can around and around, sparks flying, until the skin was black and the white inside exploded. What kind of potato was it, I asked, how did it taste? He didn't remember, but said how much fun it was and that the potatoes were filched from the stand at the corner. Of course, I shouldn't do anything like that.

French fry dilemma: Nathan's or McDonald's? Fat, ridged, savory, enough flesh inside to scrape with your tongue and let the steam of fatted starch flood your mouth. Date: very early '50s. Coney Island, still festive, was close to where we lived. Nothing could be more special, a gift from Daddy just to me, but dozens of others, with identical smiles, are eating exactly the same thing -- a little boy's first lesson in social paradox.

Next lesson came in a car with richer relatives, on a drive to a brand new burger place, not an old, tired White Castle (whose multiple hamburger summaries I loved), but something jazzy and suburban, the first of its kind on Long Island. Here, take this ... and cousin Rusty pushed a hot bag bulging with shiny, skinny sticks into my face. When I delicately plucked out a single one, a bunch fell into my lap, staining my chinos. Heat! Salt! And a tease of my friend the potato waving goodbye. Date: later '50s, post-Elvis, pre-Beatles. Which fry was I -- or could I be both?

I had, coincidentally, just finished a book about the Great Potato Famine. Jackie O. kept her weight down and spirits up with a glittering supper of a single baked and slit Idaho topped with Beluga: tiny obsidian eggs growing on the edges of a big brown one. When I went to the basket under the San Diego sink to get a potato for one of my student-poverty lunches (should his father's son filch some caviar from the shop around the corner?), my hand felt something slimy. As I grabbed, the hard part collapsed, and the wild smell that erupted from the dark shocked me to near oblivion. How could something so predictable, so bland, become home to such complete and fetid corruption?

When I revived I saw that the surrounding potatoes were unaffected, and if I could forget how close they had been to the devil, would be boiled and buttered soon. Yes, I thought, still shaken, there's a lesson in this somewhere.

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