I’m not what you would call a picky eater.

I eat pretty well, because I have a sessile job and if I eat garbage I get fat. Simple. Despite the care I take, I’ll try pretty much anything once. I’ll usually even try things I genuinely don’t like a few more times to make sure I don’t like them (this is largely because of the massive turnaround I had with beer during adolescence).

I have a problem with picky eaters. Vegetarians are OK by me, as are vegans, because both practices take a hell of a lot of discipline. If they do it properly and stick to their guns, more power to ‘em, as long as they don’t get preachy. My problem with them arises when they start being...flexible.

I know a lot of emaciated little indie rawk kids who claim to be vegans, but it’s very easy to be vegan when all you consume is coffee, cigarettes, and Slurpees. Emo. I hate emo. Apparently, this term means “emotional rock”. As far as I can tell, they’re only emotional because they’re malnourished. I've caught more than one of them guiltily scarfing down a McGreaseballburger late at night while stoned. I call this "conveganence".

I do know one hippiechick who works hard at her veganism. But last night she confused me. She called me up to tell me about her upcoming trip to Thailand, and she left off a sentence saying “I’m eating pizza in bed.”

“Pizza? Is that vegan?”

“I’m in bed.”

“Bed is a vegan safe zone? Hmm...I guess some types of animal products are occasionally consumed in bed...”

“No, no, gross. No, it has no cheese on it.”

OK, I have a lot of tolerance for alternative diets, but tomato sauce on bread with some vegetables is not pizza.

I was pretty much cured of any pickinesses I had during my time in Japan, Land of Challenging Foods.

I was the first English-speaking foreigner ever to live in the little town of Iga. I was treated like a mascot in many ways, and often not taken very seriously, but everyone wanted to have me over for dinner. The mayor, the school principals, the factory owner...they all wanted to feed the esteemed young roundeye.

Now most of it was delicious, new, and interesting, but I think there was a certain amount of machismo involved. There certainly was with the drinking (they learned quickly not to try and outdrink a large Canadian male), but even with the food, I still have a strong suspicion there was some “I sure don’t like this stuff...let’s see if the white guy will eat it” going on.

The Japanese have a separate alphabet used to render foreign sounds pronouncable to them. When I arrived I could sort of sound things out, which made for some comedy. Chikkin kuroketto...uh…chicken croquet? That conjures up some images, doesn’t it? Luckily I speak French, so eventually I realized they meant croquette, which means “little crunchy thing.” Chikkin kuroketto is basically McNuggets. Want to know why they’re crunchy? Yes, the deep-fried batter is partially responsible. But it has more to do with the fact that they leave. the cartilege. in.

One upside of learning that foods can be disturbing on a cultural basis is that it is possible to fully gross out a Japanese by eating a raw carrot stick in front of them. Japanese are known for eating raw meat, but they will steam a simple salad. Why? They're afraid of parasites. It seems to make no sense to them that Westerners would worry about parasites which live in fellow vertebrates, but not so much about those that might inhabit a radish.

Yesirree: pickled jellyfish, rotten soybeans in what appeared to be snot, the pasty yellow reproductive organs of starfish...oo baby I ate it (for the record, starfish organs taste the way low tide smells, but jellyfish is awesome). I actually liked a lot of the weirder things, but I won't pretend I didn't get a lot of practice at suppressing my gag reflex. It’s almost a shame I’m not a gay man.

I have some theories about the origins of some of Japan’s more esoteric culinary experiences. Japan is a very mountainous country. It has huge cities, but they’re largely confined to the coasts, and even on the coasts, they’re mostly in estuaries and other such flatland. The rest of the Japanese coast (at least near where I lived) is cut with headlands and fjords, with tiny villages dotting small coves. The roads to these towns are scary as hell, and I’m already from a mountainous place.

Once I was trying to get from Osaka airport to a party in one of these towns. It was cold and foggy. What was marked as a highway on the map (me and my shortcuts) was actually a one-lane barely-paved track down the side of a cliff. On one side, cliff goes up. On the other side, cliff goes down. Way down. So I’m pootling along in the dark, in my tiny right-hand drive car, in pea-soup fog. No one knows where I am, my cellphone is nowhere near an antenna. Periodically I have to get out to collect my nerves and check the tiny overgrown signs to make sure I’m still on “highway” 14. I should mention that I am on a mountain called Rei-zan, or “Ghost Mountain”. As I get out to squint at the road sign, I notice a large ragged bundle of something deceased-looking on the side of the road. I go closer.

It...has hands.

Is it...a child?

You ain’t been anywhere close to creeped out until you see yourself some monkey roadkill on a haunted mountain.

But I digress.

So imagine one of these isolated villages in feudal times during nasty weather. The sea is stormy, you can’t climb the near-vertical headlands in the wind, and you have hostile clans all around you, some of which employ ninjas. You can’t fish; you can’t trade...eventually you’re going to run out of food.

“Hey, Shintaro, I pulled some more of those purple things off the rocks over there. Yeah, I know, the orangey parts are bad...can Yoshi move his legs yet? I was thinking maybe these greenish bits are OK? Oh...I didn’t know that’s why Grandma went blind. Uh...how about this seaweed here?”

And so on. I truly believe that only famine and desperation can explain knowing which are the good bits on a sea cucumber.

There’s also something very weird going on with Japanese snack treats. There is this highly disturbing bodily-product theme happening which I’m really not sure about.

Many people have heard of the citrus sports drink known as Pocari Sweat. OK, sports drink, sweat in the name. I see the semantic connection.

Or I thought I did...it would seem the connection is a bit more involved.

One of the main competitors of Pocari Sweat is known as Calpis Water, or Karupisu Wohtah in Japanese. English speakers hear it sounding like Cow Piss Water, and while this is a source of obvious chuckles, it is, in fact, a red herring. Despite the “pis” in the name, karupisu is actually a euphemism for another type of bodily fluid. Calpis Water is an opaque, milky-white liquid.

I’ll stop there.

One of my favourite Japanese beverages is C.C. Lemon, a wonderful sparkling lemonade whose label proudly proclaims “30 lemons worth of vitamin C in every bottle!”; a level which I’m pretty sure is fatal, but that’s beside the point.

C.C. clearly refers to the vitamin, but it’s also a pun. Japanese cannot pronounce the English syllable “see”, so they say “shi”. Shi-shi Remon.

I didn’t clue in to this refreshing beverage being another member of the Human Excreta trend until I heard my boss’s daughter telling him she has to “shi-shi shitai”. You guessed it...little Mizuki had to make tinkle. C.C. Lemon is bright yellow, and again, I'll stop there.

You might think this trend is confined to beverages and that I’m stretching things; however:

“Crunky” is not a good name for a chocolate treat, but that’s just kind of an unpleasant name...much worse is the rather point-blank Asse.

My personal favourite, often sold right next to the Pocky, is the delicious little cookie tube with chocolate filling known as Collon.

It's odd. I like Japanese food, but this is a strange trend...if something isn't actively unpleasant on its own, they feel the need to make it sound icky.

I wonder if they know? After all, Coke is named after the same plant they make cocaine from, Pepsi is named after a digestive enzyme, and Jones originally meant to crave heroin. Vermicelli means "little worms" and penne refers to an uncircumcised boy...but who ever thinks about those things?

Hmm...I guess maybe whoever reads this will...now. Maybe with language and food, ignorance truly is bliss.