Why did our ancestors try to eat blowfish at the expense of many lives?

I didn’t know until recently that people rarely eat blowfish outside Japan. As you know, the blowfish poison, tetrodotoxin is very strong. A popular Japanese blowfish can kill about 10 people. I guess Japanese people may look crazy and reckless, but I assure you that Japan is the safest place in the world to eat blowfish because everything is strictly controlled by law, such as sales, distribution, cooking, and even disposal. Why don’t you challenge yourself and give it a try when you come to Japan.

Do I eat it very often? No way! Blowfish is a luxurious food, and also, I don’t think it’s particularly delicious. It seems there’s a certain number of Japanese people who are skeptical about the taste and value of blowfish like me. They say “I can only taste the sauce,” “I don’t know why it’s that expensive,” etc. I understand their feelings, but I think the price is reasonable considering the consumption process that requires a lot of time and effort. What I can’t understand is what made ancient people try to eat blowfish, though it’s not so delicious that it can appeal to all tastes, and there are many other good-taste fish in Japan, a country surrounded by the sea. Let’s consider human’s insatiable curiosity.

We can’t stop our curiosity until we die.

A cat has nine lives. There’s no such a proverb and a common sense (that cats die hard) in Japan, and accordingly, the following proverb doesn’t make sense at all to Japanese people: “Curiosity killed the cat.” Recently I happened to find an article about a behavioral science experiment, and I come to think the proverb is very well said and also that it may be only curiosity that made ancient Japanese people try to eat blowfish even at the expense of many lives.

In order to make you understand how uncontrollable our curiosity is, let me share the result of the experiment. In their experiment, a set of mechanical pencils were prepared, and there is one pencil that gives a small electric shock when it’s knocked. Some university students were divided into two groups. One group of students were told how to identify the electric pencil (Group A); the other group of students were only told that one electric pencil is included (Group B). All the students were asked to wait in a room with the set of mechanical pencils.

The result showed much more students of the Group B knocked the pencils and got shocked time and again. Mind you, the students were asked just to wait there, not asked to find the electric pencil. Funnily enough, the students of the Group B continued to get shocked for nothing, only for satisfying their curiosity, to be more precise. As the proverb says, it seems we can’t stop our curiosity until we die.

You can’t help but try our Hokkaido Smoked Coffee.

Don’t you think this human nature can solve many mysteries about food? There are many foods that make us wonder why our ancestors tried to eat it, such as Natto (Japanese fermented soybeans), though I like it. If we think clearly and calmly, coffee must have been quite a challenge, too. It’s not the flesh part but inedible seeds of coffee cherry. How did they come up with the idea to extract coffee after roasting, milling, and pouring boiled water to the seeds?

Finally, I’ve reached the punchline of this article. Today, let me introduce our new product: Hokkaido Smoked Coffee! We are a wooden furniture maker and always trying to reduce the waste of wood, but we can’t make it zero. A large amount of wood chips and dust are produced every day. We collect them in our factory and send them to a coffee roaster in Sapporo, and they smoke their coffee beans. Currently the wood species used for our furniture are Oak, Ash, Birch, Sakura, Elm, and Sen. We use them separately, and the Hokkaido Smoked Coffee packs are offered in the six different wood species. It will be released this September (2024). Let us know if you are curious!

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