SUSHI CLASSES WITH CHEF SANG

On Saturday November 16, 2013, I gave a TEDx Talk to an auditorium full of high school students at the Ontario Science Centre.

Food Literacy: Equal to Math, Science and Languages? Um, yes!

Photo courtesy: Nicholas Jones

The theme of this year’s talks was: “Discover”. The speakers were each asked to fill in the blank after the theme word and give their talk around those combination of words. I filled in my own with “Yourself” and in the months leading up to the big day I meditated on the meaning of that for me.

Discover “_____________”

Photo courtesy: Nicholas Jones

My talk was much more personal than I had originally intended. In fact, during my first rehearsal at Stone Soup Innovation Lab, I veered away from the most uncomfortable bits of my past, speaking stiffly in generalities about food literacy, but the great intuitive speaking coach, Kate Hodgson, founder of IKommunications, gently guided me back to the path. She had convinced me that the best way to get my message across was to speak from the bowels of my experience: and this has always been about growing up ass poor and hungry in one of the poorest urban neighbourhoods of our country: the Jane & Finch housing projects. So, when the time came to give my talk (and in precisely seventeen minutes)  I told the story of how I came to discover my self and my defining passions, through poverty and hunger.

They came to listen.

Photo courtesy: Nicholas Jones

I probed into some painful moments, spoke about the raw emotion I felt during those months when the social assistance cheque that my single mother of three children qualified for never materialized in the mail. The truth was that sometimes when things got really bad, I would wander over to the Jane and Finch mall with my friends to steal. They stole the latest Adidas sneakers and I stole food for me and my family.

Price Chopper

And it was not nutritious food I stole, unless, like so many other children around the world, you were led to believe what the creators of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Chef Boyardee’s Beefaroni or Dinty Moore Chicken Pot Pies would have you believe through their commercials: that if you didn’t consume these products all the time, your happiness (not to speak of your health) would spiral irretrievably into some heaving bottomless pit.

My family felt the pinch during the holiday seasons, especially around Christmas. From where we sat, in a drafty and (unintended) minimalist concrete tenement living room, and skewed through the rose-tinted lenses of our television set, Christmas was a time of bounty and excess for other people: of golden brown Franken-turkeys and mountains of perfectly-wrapped gifts under a well-lit tree, as an over-extended family of impossibly good-looking white folk lingered about in their wool turtlenecks, ready to burst into rounds of The Little Drummer Boy. No such Christmases for us. SPAM pizza if we were lucky, and we were not always so lucky.

All I Want For Christmas…

There was the one Christmas when I was sixteen years old. My mother had taken my younger sister and brother to a Bible retreat north of Toronto. For reasons I can no longer recall, I found myself alone at home that Christmas eve. It may have been a fight I had had with my mother, a common rite of passage at the time, but I cannot be certain. As per usual, not a creature was stirring and not a crumb in the house,  so I put on my coat and ventured out to the local convenience store. The shop owner and I eyed each other warily (although he must have been a bit confused as to why I was looking at him as though he was the thief. I have, over the years, routinely laughed to myself as I imagined him interrogating himself at the end of the night for stealing something from his own shop, like some crazed character out of Kafka, unrelenting until he got to the bottom of a crime he did not commit). I hung around the back part of the shop, where the drink fridge and ice cream freezers were located. When he was distracted by a couple who came to purchase cigarettes, I slipped a Swanson’s frozen turkey dinner under my coat,  fitting snugly (if a bit icily) between my arm and ribs. I went home and put my Christmas turkey into the microwave. It was no It’s A Wonderful Life, but I must have felt some stirring of the holiday spirit.

The self-probing that led me to my TED talk affected me more than I thought it would. I came to have a multifaceted understanding about the nature of food literacy; this by living through it, I realized, and not gleaned from some book. I had developed, surprisingly, a nuanced approach to my relationship with food and came to the following conclusions: food literacy is not merely about how to balance a healthy diet by following Canada’s Food Guide. Or about describing the difference between broccoli and pizza. At its core, it’s also about understanding how industrialization and commercial greed undermines and exploits our visceral connection to earth’s bounty. Why many genetically modified products are created and subsidized to be more affordable than what is grown and raised naturally. It’s also about food insecurity and injustice and why people are made to suffer needlessly when they could so easily be given the tools to understand the conditions around what they are told to eat.

People are starving to death in developing countries because they have no access to all our “waste”, this I am told repeatedly and with too much well-intentioned, but misguided passion. There is nothing I can do about it. Except this: arm myself with better tools of understanding my situation and pass what I have learned onto others. Then repeat. The tragic issues around food shortage in some exotic place (read: the Other’s problem), thousands of miles away, cannot ever, EVER, be overcome until we keep the diseases of waste and hunger and poverty close to home, let our children be infected by it; unless we decide for ourselves, once and for all, that a child who starves over there is no different than the child who is kept ignorant of why it is happening in a country like our own.

Food literacy. Make it mandatory. Teach it in every grade. Like Math and Science and Language. Like Compassion. Costs almost nothing.

The journey to discover- and overcome- food illiteracy wasn’t easy for me. And it’s not easy for anyone else when there is no test they have to pass because there is no class they ever have to attend to learn about it. And therefore, without education to arm us, the journey to help others overcome it is all the more daunting. But it has to be done; like homework or the Herculean effort required to truly love another (especially the “stranger” on the other side of the pond)- it just simply has to be done. I have chosen to do this, but I know I am not alone. In this tiny blog at the corner of this place and that, somewhere in the increasingly expanding blogosphere, real people are standing by me, shouting their support (I heard it at the Science Centre), some of them now speaking to their teachers and Principals and parents. They are doing this to usher us closer to a time that they- and their future children- deserve; a time when people like me will no longer be required to stand on some virtual corner talking about this easily-remedied problem.

*     *     *

My TEDx Talk is here.

Those who have taken my classes know how important the issue of food literacy for children is to me. I start every session talking about it before we get down to the nuts and bolts of making sushi itself. It all stems from my experience of growing up in the Jane-Finch housing projects, where welfare cheques were meager and nutritious food even more so. As a pimply kid helping to raise two younger siblings while our single mother worked three part-time jobs, learning about food literacy wasn’t exactly on my list of priorities; and even if it was, food literacy programs just weren’t readily available. The schools didn’t teach it (except for one year in junior high school, when we were taught to make classic WASP dishes like mac ‘n cheese and beef stroganoff by the eternally optimistic Miss Harriet — she never told us her last name– in her “Home Economics” class); libraries didn’t have books on it (at least what would have been intelligible to a pre-teen); and television was too busy turning our gaze to the kind of food that, even as children, we just knew was low on the nutrition scale because it was so high on the ‘craving’ one. Finally, local supermarkets, developed in board rooms far removed from the hub of immigrant life were not responsive to communities desperately needing to re-connect with their culinary roots (try buying napa cabbage to make kimchi, a Korean staple, at Price Choppers in the ’80s).  Food illiteracy was the norm and everyone suffered for it. 

This is why food literacy for children became my singular focus outside of making a living. In my own small way, I wanted to get out there and let children discover what schools/libraries and television and the limited options in supermarkets did not let me discover during my own adolescence. But I felt limited in how I could achieve this. For years, I was “the guy who did sushi”, and for reasons that perplex me today, I didn’t give much thought to how my expertise in sushi could help my cause. In 2006, when I first launched my classes (it was called “Sushi 101” then), I lacked the imagination to find a link between sushi and food literacy. But within two years, with the help of some wonderful teachers and parents who shared my belief that the ABCs of literacy (reading, writing, math) must include food, I was in classrooms, teaching the basics of nutrition by rolling sushi. 

This was soon followed by overwhelming buy-in by decision-making adults who could help me make a difference. I was allowed into the boardrooms of multinational companies to teach their senior managers and executives how to roll a California Roll; but these people, many of whom had children of their own, seemed more interested in my food literacy quest than the difference between two grades of sushi rice or how nori is processed. They wanted to know the WHY of what I did and wondered how they could help me mobilize my ideas to far greater numbers of people.

And, of course, that answer to the question “why” always comes easily off my tongue: it’s about the kids, about giving them free reign to deepen what they already know: that the preparation of nutritious food in a safe environment is a basic human right no matter your age and that a child should be taught how to engage his/her rights from the moment their parents register them in their very first institution. So in 2009, I set myself a goal: to conduct the world’s largest connected sushi-making class by 2015. The idea is a simple one: connect thousands of children from all seven continents, including Antarctica and the Arctic Circle, with hundreds of children here in downtown Toronto and teach them how to make sushi. This would be accomplished over a twelve-hour cycle via the internet. The ultimate objective is to get one clear message out to the grown-up world: that institutional food policies and food literacy programs should be adopted within our school systems with the goal of a healthy child at the center of it. The nourishment of the mind and body must have equal emphasis in the classroom. 

This spring, I did a pilot project with children in Kampala, Uganda. Through an organization, called Kids Canada, Ugandan children were connected with children in my Toronto restaurant via Skype. Other great organizations on the ground in Uganda also played a key role in ensuring the success of the project, including Kyoto Japanese Restaurant, whose owner, Ahmed Rende, and his chef procured all the ingredients; Insieme Si Puo, who was kind enough to offer the space for the class; Sosolya Undugu Dance Academy; and Pellitier Teenage Mothers’ Foundation, a powerful womens’ organization run by the indomitable spirit-warrior, Solome Nanvule. But, of course, none of this would have been possible without photographer and activist, Maylynn Quan, who does life-altering under-the-radar work in Uganda through her cultural exchanges, photography workshops, clean water projects, and micro businesses. Her astonishing generosity of spirit, as well as her experiences while she was in Uganda at the time of the pilot project, are documented in a blog called How To Change The World In 30 Days. It is moving stuff.

On Sunday April 14th, 11am local time and 5pm Kampala time, we linked up over a patchy internet connection. Children came to my restaurant, Yakitori Bar, and met with children over there gathered in the Insieme Si Puo office space. After a glorious showcase of traditional Ugandan music and dance by Sosolya to inaugurate the festivities, I taught the kids the basics of sushi-making through a webcam. They picked it up quickly and rolled with it.

Children on a continent where sushi is an alien concept (read: exotic, oriental, Other) tried something new. They discovered, as children do (in spite of cultural, religious, racial, gender and continental differences), yet another way to explore the infinite possibilities of the world and their relationship to it. They went from ME to WE within a span of two hours, connecting with others in ways that was impossible for me at their age. Through a simple sushi-making exercise, they learned that food, like any of the other forms of love, unites.  The experience transformed everyone involved. 

All of this was a prelude to a goal I set out for myself years ago: to conduct the Guinness Book Of World Records’ “Largest connected sushi-making class”. I want to do this by spring of 2014, but I cannot do it alone. I need help from people up and down the food chain and across all the partitions set up to divide people, especially children, in our society. Perhaps, dear reader, in a moment of revelry, as you look back at a time in your own life when you wondered why Reading, Writing and Math was so important to the adults around you but Food Literacy never got an honorable mention– perhaps you might find yourself afterwards considering ways to make this dream of mine (ours) happen?

“Yes, the springtimes need you.

Often a star was waiting for you to notice it

A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past

Or, as you walked under an open window,

A violin yielded itself to your hearing.

All this was mission

But could you accomplish it?”

-Rainer Maria Rilke-

This post was published by the HUFFINGTON POST as”How Death Changed Our Child”. You can read it here.

That the flash flood felt, by Toronto standards, Biblical in scale, brought Noah and his ark to mind. I had made it to the airport mere minutes ahead of the news of submerged cars, power outages, and flooded subway stations. The 4:25pm Tokyo-Toronto plane circled above the angry clouds for an hour, then diverted to Ottawa to refuel. The six-hour wait for the plane’s return to Pearson International gave me time to think. Outside the Arrivals zone, sheets of water pummeled waiting taxis and I thought about what Noah had fed his family during the 375 days they were on board the ark.

Fish, of course. And with no refridgeration, mostly raw fish: sushi. I imagined him and his sons out on the deck, bracing themselves against the rocking waves and unrelenting downpour and casting their net into the bottomless ocean. Nobody in their right mind would have started a fire in an ark made from willow branches and palm leaves. No point burning the house down when you are the only house left floating in the world.

I also thought about the conversation I had had with my daughter’s mother three weeks ago, after receiving word that our daughter’s sobo (grandmother) had passed away in Japan. Should she take our daughter with her to engage in the potentially traumatic Buddhist rituals around her sobo’s cremated body? We were mindful of the gravity of the experience and knew that it would be a watershed moment in our daughter’s life; another rite of passage that would be as defining as when she uttered her first meaningful word, took her first step, and strung together her first coherent question. In the end, we thought she was ready. So did she, our brave eight year-old.

We were all wrong.

Nothing leaves a more lasting and indelible impression than the death of a family member, even as the passage of Time attempts to make a smudge of it and Memory unabashedly blurs the line between fact and fancy. Death confuses. Our minds tell us one thing and our bodies another. We know it is a natural phenomenon (older people told us so); yet we feel that it is somehow alien, like the way disease feels alien in our bodies.

In the car, our daughter referred to them as “the shivers”.

“It feels like something hurting in my feet and then moving up to my head.”

According to her mother, this “dis-ease” had been afflicting her since that day she picked up the bones of her somo’s cremated body and placed them in a ceremonial vase, a custom for family members of the deceased.

At home that night, we spread out a mattress on the living room floor. She didn’t want to sleep alone.

“I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“About what?”

“About mommy dying.”

I offered some meditation advice: lean into the thought, become friends with it, be gentle with yourself.

“Think Monsters Inc. Remember Boo? The monsters weren’t scary to her when she wanted to hold them. They were just cuddly things that needed her love.”

She clung to her stuffed Hello Kitty doll each time a wave of monsters rose up her body and toward her head. It didn’t help. I massaged her feet and legs and asked her to describe as specifically as she could just what was bothering her.

“Picking up the bones of somo’s nose to put it in the jar. And not wanting mommy to die.”

Later that night, with the second storm rattling our windows, the torrent began:

“I want to die before mommy so that I could spend the rest of my life with her. I want to die before mommy because it would hurt too much if she died before me. I love mommy so much, daddy, I love her so much, and I don’t want her to die.”

The tears were of a new kind, came from a different place. The cries: primal, atavistic. Tears and cries that break the hearts of even the most hardened parents. She was no longer the same child I said goodbye to at the airport three weeks ago.

And this annihilated me.

“Daddy, why do people have to die?”

Clichés issue easily from us when we see another human being suffering.  And who wants to utter naked truths at such a time, especially when it is to your own 8 year-old child?  The existence of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy is one thing; a death in the family, another. Forgetting is long and she will never forgive you for the platitudes, the bullshit. This I knew. And yet I wanted to feed my daughter lies so that she could sleep, feel better when she woke; feed her lies so that I could sleep, feel better when I woke. But it was still afternoon in Japan; sleep would not come easy for her. So we stayed up all night and cut to the chase. I needed to hear that crushing incoherent noise that was at the source of my daughter’s pain.

Yes, I wanted to lie to her, to the one person I loved most in this world. But I could not.

“What if mommy doesn’t live a long life. How do you know if she won’t die tomorrow?

“I don’t, my love. Mommy might die tomorrow. We can’t know. But because of you she is trying to be around for a long time, to watch you grow.”

“What if we died together? Then we can meet in heaven together at the same time, right?”

“There is no heaven out there, sweetie. What is beautiful and what is horrible is inside all of us.”

“But if we can’t meet somewhere after we die, what’s the point of living? It doesn’t make sense.”

“You are right. It makes no sense.”

“Daddy, I wish people didn’t have to die. I wish they could live forever. Don’t you?”

“No, I don’t. When we know that people die, we appreciate them more. Don’t you?”

“No, I think that I would appreciate them more because I see them all the time.”

You stop yourself. You don’t want to argue with a child’s logic of love.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“I feel it coming again.”

“What does it feel like?”

“Like my brain is about to explode. It doesn’t stop time. Everybody changes. I wish I had a time machine.” 

“I understand.”

I held her. She held Hello Kitty. All night.

The following morning, when the clouds broke and I thought the sun would never rise, she said:

“Daddy, can we make sushi for mommy when she wakes up?”

I washed and prepared the rice. We emptied the fridge of left-overs: grilled chicken, pork, raw salmon, vegetables. She set out the rolling mats and sheets of nori on our garden table.

And we went to work. Silently, in unison. We piled everything we could onto full and half sheets. We rolled. We cut the rolls. It was messy. Like love. Like life.

And death.

We gave each other high-fives and hugged. It felt different. She leaned into it.

The sky began to darken again, so we moved everything inside. Storm clouds and more shivers. I thought about Noah again, about his family safely ensconced in the ark, and I imagined him whispering to himself as he waved a contemptuous farewell to a world gone corrupt, superfluous: Apre moi, le deluge.

After me, the flood…

Another great addition to the collection of reviews about the sushi classes and hints of a massive personal project in the works with children and food literacy around the world.

Check out the wildly creative Trend Hunter video here.

New format for signing up for Levels I and II. Go to the Classes tab for details.

“Since becoming a popular international cuisine only a few decades ago, sushi has become a household name and Sang Kim, owner of the Yakitori Bar, is trying to make sure this nutritional food stays for good.

Most people experience sushi only when dining out, but Kim, owner of the recently opened Yakitori Bar in Toronto, is using all of his culinary knowledge and skills to make this healthy delicacy available the one place it absolutely should be.

Also the creator of the Yakitori Bar’s Sushi Making for the Soul class, Kim teaches attendants the techniques and history behind this centuries old culinary art form.

Since he is also interested in enlightening immigrant youths and families about the nutritional benefits of this delicious cost-effective cuisine, Sang gave the Trend Hunter team a tasty and educational introduction into the art of sushi making.” Brandon Bastaldo

My love of observing children making discoveries for the very first time answers the perennial question of why I, paradoxically, also get a kick out of conducting classes to a room full of adults. Most of my classes, both onsite and away, comprise of adults who, after overcoming the initial unsettling feeling of doing something new, display the same quality of enthusiasm and playfulness that I so much enjoy watching in children. This cannot be helped, I guess, especially in the Level I Makimono class, because there is something about dipping your hands in water, smooshing a riceball across a sheet of nori, creatively blending in available ingredients, and that self-congratulatory posture bordering on narcissism when the roll has been finished, that seems to revive some dormant inner child in us time-worn people. It hearkens back to those less encumbered days when we squished Playdoh between our fingers and fingerpainted on the wall. And it seems to lend a kind of solace to those of us who may feel that time and experience has all but worn away any traces of the “childish” in us. I hear it all the time- from banking executives to housewives to one grandfather who was “dragged” all the way from Owen Sound by his granddaughter to try sushi for the first time- about how fun the class was, how much for granted they took the simple pleasures derived from coordinating their hands, eyes, and heart; alas, how they took for granted the simple pleasures of acting like children again.

Recently, I was asked to emcee an event for The Nggaali Project, a fundraising gala whose ultimate purpose was to bring the children of Uganda and Canada together under “one roof”. It was held at the Daniels Spectrum theatre in the recently revived Regent Park area of Toronto.  It was a grand night of dancing and singing and dining, all in the name of sharing with people across the pond.

It was thrilling to see these young faces beaming across the computer screen from someone’s backyard in Kampala, enjoying the festivities in their honour with us over Skype. I decided then and there that I wanted to conduct a sushi making class with these very children who had never heard of, not to speak of, tasted, sushi. So, with the director of Nggaali Kids, Maylynn Quan, who will be making her way to Uganda in March, it was settled: I would teach them how to make sushi all for the narcissistic pleasure of watching these children make new discoveries. They loved the idea over there as well. The date for this momentous event will be in late April and it will be held at Yakitori Bar. I would be assisted by children over here, who would participate as sushi makers on this side. I would also need to find ingredients that work appropriately for a Ugandan palate- they get squeamish at the idea of raw fish. All exciting stuff. Oh, and very childish of course; ergo, utterly meaningful fun…