The Times January 20, 2007
It's smelly, slimy and Japan can't get enough
Richard Lloyd Parry in Tokyo
It smells like a mixture of overripe Gorgonzola and putrefying mushrooms. Its texture is that of slugs stuffed with mozzarella. It is natto, or rotten soya beans, and is one of the world’s most challenging foods, as loved and loathed in Japan as black puddings are in Britain or rotten herrings in Sweden.
And in the past few days it has become a cult, as natto-mania has swept Japan, emptying supermarket shelves and leaving soya bean fermenters scrambling to catch up with the unprecedented surge in demand.
Earlier this month the television programme Revealed! Encyclopaedia of Living recommended two portions of natto a day as a way of losing weight in only two weeks. By the following lunchtime, natto had sold out nationwide.
Terrible way to describe our natto! I know foreign-born residents in Japan not always hate natto.
The programme described here had been quite doubtful from the point of view of science. It's called Pseudo or Fake science. For me it is almost a cult. So many believers it has.
Some of the sufferer are complaining "I didn't lose weight!"...Hey.....!
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