Send for the sushi police!

Seems like the sushi police are needed in India, where it has recently emerged that an England cricket player spent a week in bed after eating at a Japanese restaurant.

Perhaps the England team could also send for a few brain cells to share between the team - eating raw fish in the middle of India (they were about 200 miles from the nearest coast) in the middle of a competition is about as stupid as using boxing for team bonding just before the Ashes, and they wouldn't do that, would they?

Laugh? I nearly choked on my kani-jaga-mayo pizza

For those who aren't up on the lingo, kani = crab, jaga = potato and mayo, yes, mayo is mayonnaise. And rest assured that the title is not some gruesome post-Christmas culinary fantasy brought on by overindulgence, but one of the top billing choices of pizza on the flyer of the local "Pizza-La" delivery chain. Alternatives include crab, macaroni, corn and white sauce, or teriyaki chicken, seaweed, corn and mayonnaise, or...well I think you get the message. It makes me feel slightly queasy just typing it.

So I couldn't help but laugh at the latest installment of the "sushi police" as reported in the Torygraph

Now, Mr Kanda along with a string of leading Japanese sushi experts have declared war on so-called "pseudo sushi" in Europe – food which claims to be sushi in countless high street cafes, supermarkets and restaurants but in fact bears little resemblance to what is found in Japan.

Early next year, the sushi tsars will open Europe's first sushi academy in London devoted to professionally training chefs in a bid to correct increasingly erroneous misconceptions of what sushi should consist of.

"The Italians would never allow their pizzas not to be perfectly crusty outside Italy," said Mr Kanda. "The French are also protective of their cuisine. We want to do the same with Japanese food. There is no quality control at the moment."

I can only charitably assume that he has never lowered himself to the level of eating pizza - or indeed any sort of foreign food - in Japan. (not that "crustiness" is specifically the issue here, other than that of the men who think they should attempt to control what gets eaten around the world...)