Tuna Kahuna! -- A Picky Eater Learns to Love Seafood!
By Tom Lucier

After my father remarried, his wife started an unpopular food trend; tuna and relish. What kind of sick joke is this?" I remember asking myself, staring at the little green globs in my lunch.

I graduated from tuna to eating the odd salmon sandwich, prepared exactly the same as the old tuna ones were. It was a pathetic transition, from a white fish-puck to a pink fish-puck.

I didn't have a reason to acclimatize myself with seafood. How often do you face seafood at a friend's house? Rarely. This concerned me while growing up. One of the worst feelings while eating at a friend's house is repeating "No thank you" to a parade of legumes, leaves, and tubers. I noticed that seafood was rare at these occasions. My family never pushed perch on my friends when they came over, so I assumed that that rule was in effect for most dinner hosts. Why condition myself to eat something I'll probably never be faced with eating?

I eventually went through an arduous process of "learning" how to like tomatoes, peas, beans, carrots, broccoli and lots of other food items served at most North American meals. I taught myself to like them to save myself the embarrassment if I were to ever find myself at a stranger's dinner table or at a restaurant.

While on a skiing trip in southwestern Ontario, Canada, I was coaxed to eat escargot by my older brother one evening at the lodge restaurant. He was reduced to bribing a thirteen year old to chew on a snail for five dollars. For five dollars, I would've eaten the plate.

The experience was like sampling a garlic flavoured rubber eraser. Chewy vampire repellant. It wasn't much else. I took my five dollars and later documented the experience to everyone when I got home. "I ate snails! Real snails…I think." How would I know?

As the years crawled by, I sampled other seafood. Shrimp, for example. Shrimp from the grocery store (usually in ring form), or on a plate at Red Lobster. I had wanted to try lobster or crab, but alas, it was always too expensive. I was, after all, only a teenager.

Fish was not something I was brave enough to order at any restaurant. I remember eating fish and chips from Pat and Hanks, a local seafood favourite. This was basically a mystery, globular white meat encased in a crusty batter dripping with grease. Tartar sauce always seemed to amplify the "seafood" experience. The only way I could tell if there was any tartar sauce on it was if there were black specks on the white area. The fish and the sauce were the same color and only a few protons and neutrons separated them from being the same consistency. Needless to say, when I walked in the house and was greeted with, "There's fish and chips in the fridge," I shuddered.

My mother had given me a base for my fear of seafood. This is ironic since she was the one who made me conscious that I needed to increase my menu of acceptable food to eat. She told me a story about how she ate filet of sole one night before her sister's wedding. Her face swelled up and left her looking like a catfish herself, lips puckered, covering her teeth even when she smiled.

My other fear of seafood stemmed from a score of news stories damning mussels to hell for apparently killing and infecting hundreds in North America. "Doesn't affect me. I'll never eat the stuff. They must be nuts." Now my excuse was the fear of possible harm coming to me through genetic allergies or from an eco-virus.

On top of all this, the water coming out of the tap in my kitchen stank for the first time in any of our memories. Why did it stink? My father explained it in his special way.

"Damn zebra mussels!" he cursed after taking a much needed sip of "stink water" after cutting the grass one summer day. "Those buggers clog up the pipes in the river and make the water filthy!" They came on the bottoms of ships from overseas. Another creation of the seas and oceans was giving itself demerit points in a number of different categories. The little cliques of shelled nuisances would even clamp onto my bait when I went fishing in the Detroit River, located in my hometown of Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

Seafood hadn't hit the mark. In fact, it had missed it like a drunk and dizzy Robin Hood. However, my interest in trying seafood stayed intact.

A trip to El Salvador freaked me out completely. I was in a poor village that offered me a whole fish, in a bowl, boiled. That's it, just boiled. The color had been boiled off of the eyes and it looked like a fish zombie. I pretended I didn't see it and I had rice with tortillas instead.

I overcame the shock, and was still eager to try seafood. Within a couple of years, I accompanied another older brother to New Orleans on business. I was enthusiastic to try something new but I was pushed in and out of the city, forced to eat at places that satisfied everyone else's bland diets.

The Turning Point

There was a short intermission in my adventurous eating, and then it happened. Everything changed for me almost overnight. In reality, it changed over lunch. I had been pressured by some friends to eat sushi for the first time. Keep in mind, I had eaten cooked fish only four or five times in my entire life!

The hardest part, aside from the obviousness of eating RAW FISH, was getting used to the idea of it being a cold dinner. I was ill prepared for a cold main course since every dinner before that was served steaming hot. Sushi was, admittedly, wonderful and different. Raw salmon, raw tuna, cooked crab, avocado, seaweed, and rice was now…tasty. Bizarre.

After that, I wasn't afraid of ingesting anything. Shortly after the "sushi incident" I traveled to Houston, Texas, with my girlfriend, Jhoan. Her sister's husband, Trevor, took me to a Hong Kong mall and grocery store to "catch" our meal for the evening. Bring it on!

We filled brown bags with fresh blue crab from the Galveston Coast in the Gulf of Mexico. They looked angry being in a metal bin almost two hours drive from the Gulf. We also selected crawfish (a.k.a. crawdaddies or mudbugs) for filler with the crab.

Thanks to a mixture of the scraping of the claws and antennae on the brown paper bag with the stench of the seafood kaleidoscope in the grocers, I began doubting my iron stomach. "Can I do this?" I thought.

To add to my unease I watched the preparation before their quick introduction into the boiling water. The crawdads' feet made a strange ghostly sound on the bottom of the metal sink during cleaning. It was spooky, that sound mixed with the sight of these creatures fighting for space and crawling all over one another. Some had already fought the claws of other crawfish right off of their bodies. "Uh, Trevor, they're maiming each other in here."

"They won't be in pain for long," Trevor smiled deviously, furrowing his brow.

Within a half an hour, the table was set with newspaper instead of a tablecloth. Shortly thereafter, "the chosen" were brought out on platters looking as if they were left out in the sun to tan for far too long. The smell in the air was dank and thick with a fishy smell mixed with overtones of a distinct barbecued scent. It was not a smell that I was used to experiencing and just when I was pumped up enough to eat, the crab perfume gave my stomach a run for its money.

"What do I do with this?" I asked holding a crab by one claw, the way most people hold someone else's dirty socks.

First I was instructed to break off the legs "with a twist". They came off with a little "crack". Then I had to break off the gills at the bottom (weird looking crab mouth included). Because of my lesson earlier at the grocers, I knew that by the round, large gills, this was a female on my plate. This part was difficult because I had to hear an inner crunch of the gills breaking. I ignored the fact that I knew the sex of this creature and continued dissecting this horror-movie-looking thing.

As I separated its roof from its base, it was like pulling apart two wet plastic cups that have just come out of the sink. "Shluuuuck!" I removed the fat, which I was told was the orangish-yellowish goop. I piled every scrap and sliver of off-white meat on my plate. I tossed the remains on the classified section. "What now?" I asked looking like a madman ready to take a bite out of the first thing that moved.

"Dip the crab in the vinegar and pepper mix and eat it."

"Aren't there supposed to be rivers of melted butter involved here? I've seen the commercials."

Jhoan told me that it was Filipino practice to eat it this way. It was stellar! The taste inspired a transformation of my opinion of this delicacy. The meat flakes tasted a little sour with the vinegar mixture. I didn't want to waste a single drop. I was dragging my finger across the plate, pressing the meat bits to it. I slurped them off and smiled. I ate two more crabs immediately, frantically tearing away at it, trying to remember the process of the first dismemberment.

I followed this by eating some "mudbugs". This consisted of taking a mini-lobster, the length of the average middle finger, and separating it at the tail. The tradition, especially in New Orleans is to "Suck head, eat tail". I remember the t-shirts on Bourbon Street. I read a short while later that "sucking head" consisted of sucking the pancreas and liver from its torso into your mouth. True or not, I won't do it again. I will however eat the tail, which tasted like cooked shrimp. I was expecting the meat to ooze out, because of how nasty those little guys looked, but found the opposite.

Within the next three days, I sampled mussels, oysters, and catfish fried in a cornmeal breading at numerous restaurants in the Houston and Galveston area. Not once in my days of hockey puck tuna did I envision this. Every edible sea critter of my knowledge I had now eaten, thus preparing me for a trip to any East Asian country. C'mon Japan! Throw your best at me! Heck, throw your worst at me!

I look forward to the future feasting on an untold amount of misfit food from the seas and oceans. As for the canned tuna, "Anyone for a game of hockey?"

Tom Lucier is a writer/photographer who also has a self-syndicated comic strip (with his art partner Jason Sheardown) called "A Bit Off". He lives in Windsor Ontario, Canada. Jhoan Baluyot, who took the photos for this article, is also a writer/photographer also from Windsor Ontario, Canada. She has written numerous stories and taken countless photographs for news weeklies and independant papers such as "Room" magazine in Windsor. The pair plan on many travel and culinary adventures.