Ben Forrest

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Eating my way back to life

After I settled into the house on Barrington Lane, landlord Frank and fellow tenant Stu stopped by my bedroom to talk about food.

Frank and Stu were men – done with school and fond of eating well – but I was a nineteen-year-old student planning to get by on soup and Kraft Dinner.

Frank tried talking me out of that and asked if I liked curry. I couldn’t remember eating the stuff, and that was a riot.

“We’ve got a virgin!” Frank said, twisting his face into what seemed (at the time) like an evil grin.

I rode out the moment and avoided Frank and Stu’s cooking for most of the semester I lived with them. I survived on soup, pasta, frozen food and sandwiches, rarely eating things my palate didn’t recognize.

All of this to say I was not adventuresome at nineteen, and I’m still not. But there are things on my bucket list, and eating sushi was one of them.

In my youth I avoided sushi because I am wary of eating anything raw that is not a plant. A member of my family knows about food safety and was careful to school us on it growing up.

But after hearing of other relatives who tried sushi and survived, I decided to give it a shot.

My first good chance came last week in Ottawa, at a Korean restaurant offering all-you-can-eat sushi for a reasonable price.

A colleague of mine ordered a round of California rolls, dipped a roll in soy sauce, and swallowed it down. I hesitantly did the same while she snapped pictures for the record.

The rolls were squishy but good and had a pleasant aftertaste. We finished the round and had two more, as I worried aloud about spending the rest of the evening in a bathroom.

I asked my colleague – a sushi veteran – if this ever happened to her, but it hadn’t. She stressed that California rolls, which use crab meat or imitation crab, are not “real sushi.”

This did not put me entirely at ease.

“The test,” I explained, “will be an hour from now.”

An hour later I sat on a couch reading a textbook while my stomach creaked and groaned.

I waited for waves of nausea or some other reason to rush to the bathroom, but none came. My digestive system was content, and it’s been that way since.

The truth is, I will never rush somewhere in the middle of night seeking California rolls or “real sushi.”

The stuff is good but not great – something I’ll eat socially but won’t yearn for.

Still, trying sushi was an important milestone. It was a sign I’m not the same as I was at nineteen.

To go from being a curry virgin to eating (what I thought was) raw fish is proof of change, if nothing else.

It might even be proof of progress.

It’s true, of course, that many types of experimentation shorten life and don’t enhance it. Some types of experimentation make life lamentably hard.

But trying new things – the harmless kind, after thinking long and hard about them – is important. Life is better and far more interesting when we’re making our bucket lists shorter.

What’s next on mine is travelling the world and taking lots of time to write about it.

Naturally, I’m more realistic than that. My budget is tight these days and time is often in short supply.

I’d settle for growing a beard.

Text © Benjamin Robert Forrest, 2012.

Photo: Daniel St.Pierre/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Author’s note: This is a true story, but the names of some people and places have been changed.