Stupid sushi packs

You've got to hand it to the Japs - who would have thought that you could take rice and fish and make sushi? If you gave my grandma some tuna and some rice, she would have made up some sort of awful tuna casserole. If you give John West tuna, he turns it into horrible little shreds of fishy smelly stuff in a tin. I can't stomach tinned fish. Many years ago, I spent a few weeks in the north of WA and we lived on tinned tuna for lunch and dinner every day. It was never one of my favourite foods, but after you have carried a tin of fish around in your pack all day in the stinking heat, and then you open it for lunch and it instantly gathers a thick layer of flies on top, and then you shoo the flies away and try and put some tuna on a dry cracker before too many flies land on it, and then you try and stuff the whole thing in your mouth and chew before the flies start buzzing around inside your mouth making you realise that you are eating flies.... ugh. Big fat black flies. Yes, the tin was supposed to have fishy stuff in it, but the first time I opened a tin, the flies got in so fast, I thought I had opened a tin of really big caviar. Until it started moving...

So no tinned fish for me. But give me sushi any day.

Or sashimi.

However, those oh-so-clever Japs seem to have missed something when going from a sit down lunch to a take away lunch. At a sit down lunch, I get a lovely bowl of miso, a cup of tea, a box of something and a nice little dish in which to mix my wasabi and soy. I get a take away box, which is minus the miso, and the tea (which is no great loss - miso soup in a foam cup just ain't the same) - but where the fuck do I mix the wasabi with the soy? Ok, the soy comes in wierd little fish bottles, which is really strange. I can understand Thai fish sauce coming in little fish bottles, but why soy? Isn't soy a plant? Does soy taste anything like fish? Yes, both tend to be salty, but the similarities end about there.

I sometimes see Japs on the snow fields with little tins that they use to stub out and carry away their cigarette butts. Do they also carry around in another pocket a little dish in which to mix the green and black stuff together? Is this why Japanese sararimen all wear suits all the time - so they have a jacket with lots of pockets into which they can stuff things? Maybe it is like the formal version of the photographers waistcoat?

I have tried mixing it up on the lid of my sushi box, but the bloody thing is the wrong shape. It's too big. The only way to mix them is to tilt the lid ever so slightly so that it all pools in one corner. Then all it takes is some fool to bump your table and you have a nicely mixed splattering of hot green soy sauce all over your shirt and tie.

I think this is God's way of telling me to forgo the $9 take away sushi box and to sit down to a proper $15 bento box eat-in meal. Something that allows me to get endless refills of green tea, and sufficient time to read the Fin Review from back to front. The take away lunch really is a barbarous invention anyway. What is the point of eating in the office? Is the point to annoy all your office colleagues with the faint smell of fish? Eating in the office should be banned.