Japanese food is very healthy.

Is that what you generally take to be true? Apparently it is, for many Americans. I've been slowly reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a recent book in which Barbara Kingsolver, the author, documents her year of thriving on locally grown foods, including ones from her own garden. This otherwise very informed author ventures to say that Japanese kids prefer boiled and salted edamame over Twinkies for their snack food of choice. Excuse me? As far as I know, most Japanese kids reach for sweet or fried snack food over such "healthy" veggie alternative, any day of the week. (God knows I grew up on cookies, chocolate and potato chips!) They may not have Twinkies there, but they have plenty of other oh-it's-bad-for-you snack foods that sell extremely well. I have to wonder where she got that wild idea. ("Unless there's a group of people without the genes that crave for sugar and fat, everyone more or less would go for Twinkies; we're hard-wired for those flavors associated with high calories," Patrick said, and that's true.)

And of course, she's not alone in that belief. Maybe it is generally true that the average Japanese eating habit is healthier than the average American eating habit, but it seems bizarre to me that so many people automatically associate Japanese food with healthy eating. Because, every so often, it's not so.

A bowl of katsudon in the food court of Mitsuwa Marketplace.

Take this bowl of katsudon, for example. A favorite lunch item for many a Japanese corporate soldiers, katsudon features a piece of center cut pork, breaded and deep-fried in oil, then cooked briefly in soysauce-and-sugar broth, topped with an egg, some onions and served on a thick bed of rice. I haven't met a single Japanese person who doesn't like this dish, and it's a comfort food for me, too. But, the horrifying truth is, an average bowl of katsudon packs, perhaps not so surprisingly, over 1,000 calories and about 60% of your daily fat allowance. And forget about vegetables; a few cooked-down pieces of onions are all you get. (If you're lucky, it might come with a small dish of pickled cucumbers and daikon, but that adds to the sodium intake, too, while most of the vitamins are probably long gone.) Katsudon is no healthier than a Big Mac, and we love it.

Sushi, which is considered to be healthy in the U.S., is also a nutritional suspect in Japan. The fish part is fine. The rice part is the problem. Sushi vinegar has so much sugar and salt dissolved in it that diabetics and those with high blood pressure are often advised not to eat too much sushi. (My father was, for one.) And let's face it, where are the veggies for which the Japanese cooking is so prized?

Well, maybe I'm being too harsh on the eating habits of my own people. We do seem to place less emphasis on fatty meat than an average Western cook. But we do have our own culinary problem, which is (traditionally) the excess intake of sodium. Miso soup, pickles and salted dried fish--it all adds up pretty quickly. The Japanese may not die from colon cancer in massive numbers, but we do die massively from strokes and heart attacks. Different food cultures have different healthy problems inherent in them, and fantasizing an exotic food culture to be purely healthy without acknowledging its dubious side(s) seems not just dangerous but a little symplistic. I was in fact surprised by Kingsolver's innocent remark, for throughout the book, up till the (doomed?) 303rd page, she kept me admiring her wide range of knowledge about how food is grown and how it's preserved, with an occasional social and economic expositions of American industrial food production.

I suppose everybody fantasizes about exotic food, in one way or the other. And it's perhaps quite telling that many of us in this society attaches health claims to our fantasies of exotic food and the culture that accompanies it.