{"id":341,"date":"2004-03-26T00:43:04","date_gmt":"2004-03-26T07:43:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=341"},"modified":"2004-03-26T00:43:04","modified_gmt":"2004-03-26T07:43:04","slug":"top-ten-things-i-hate-about-stockholm-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2004\/03\/top-ten-things-i-hate-about-stockholm-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Top ten things I hate about Stockholm, II"},"content":{"rendered":"

The second in an occasional series.
 
Ten: Predatory seating<\/a>.<\/span>Nine: Culinary relativism.<\/span><\/p>\n

I am a food racist. There, I’ve said it. I’m not proud about it or anything. It turns out I’ve been one for years, but I did not know it until my second day in Stockholm, when Elise dragged me to the mall in Kista to kit me out with deep-winter clothes. In September. After a few hours sweating it out in burqaesque parkas, I needed to replenish my salt levels, so Elise proposed sushi.<\/p>\n

I love sushi. The only reason we in the west cook our food is because our disgusting medieval ancestors knew that cooking kills the maggots in sty-bound farm animals. I had a rare and precious opportunity to play in sties as a child in the Ardennes, and I can tell you there is nothing in there you’d want to eat raw. Or even medium-rare. Hence my longstanding reverence for the Japanese\/Korean tradition of cleanliness that was the necessary prerequisite for the coming about of sushi.<\/p>\n

When we arrived at the Kista sushi bar I was floored by something I’d never seen before. Standing behind the bar was a white guy. Actually, he was whiter than that: he was Serb, I think, and huge. I had never seen a white guy make sushi before. I soon wished that were still the case: He would pick lazily at suspiciously pre-filleted strips of fish which he then mashed onto a gob of rice in the palm of a hand the size of Montenegro. The result invariably exploded on the way from my plate to my mouth. The rolls, too, looked and tasted like stuffed hosepipe. As the Serb glared behind her, Elise turned to me and asked, chirpily, “What do you think?” “Mmm, delicious,” I gagged.<\/p>\n

In the subsequent year and a half, I’ve seen way too many white people make sushi over here. They, and their customers, all seem to think that it involves splaying bits of dead fish on rice. I don’t even know how to begin to disabuse people of that crude notionLuckily, there are a few good sushi places in Stockholm, manned by Japanese and Koreans, and at least one<\/a> that could hold its own in New York.<\/span>.<\/p>\n

This is not tolerance of gastronomic diversity on the part of Swedes, this is an unacceptable level of culinary relativism, and my stomach and I just won’t stand for it. Imagine the Japanese opening a curry restaurant; Indians running a tapas bar, with bullfighting on the television; the Spanish making Borscht; Russian babushkas catering Vietnamese food; and the Vietnamese having a big wok of mama’s secret ragu sauce simmering on the stove. Unfortunately, in Stockholm, such imagery is not always just in the mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The second in an occasional series. Ten: Predatory seating.Nine: Culinary relativism. I am a food racist. There, I’ve said it. I’m not proud about it or anything. It turns out I’ve been one for years, but I did not know it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-sweden"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-5v","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}