THE LUTEFISK INCIDENT

Dangerous Food

 

Once upon a time, I sold books to publishers and was solidly middle class, and owned an exceptionally beautiful 4 story brownstone on a gorgeous street in Park Slope, Brooklyn.   I had long red hair.  I was married. I drove a VW Passat wagon that I bought for the sticker price. I had a Sub-Zero refrigerator. I can remember very little of this entirely blessed time in my life, but I do recall that I had two incredible bathtubs, and regularly ate insanely delicious chard malfatti at a great little restaurant down the street called Al Di La.  Life was good, and with the typical delusions of bourgeois thinking I thought it would stay that way forever.  

In my fabulous kitchen which looked out to an unkempt yard, I had a little red shelf devoted to strange and horrible canned foods from other countries.  This all began when I was covering the Nagano Olympics and brought home a can of “Child Hornets.” Friends of mine started making contributions to the shelf: my friend John gave me a can of South American corn mold.  My lifetime friend Mitzy was traveling a lot for the Department of Defense at that point and found all kinds of hair-raising food stuffs on her international jaunts, e.g. an “iron tonic” for Jamaican virility that was mostly formaldehyde; a can of Laplander reindeer paté, and a can from Africa of “Calf’s Brains In Milk Gravy,” which I was careful to note provided over 3000% of my daily allowance of cholesterol. 

I had a kind of Holy Grail of disgusting foods that I yearned for. As a lover of the Canadian comedy Trailer Park Boys, I even watched (and enjoyed) the feature film of their idiotic European shenanigans.  The characters, in Sweden, are faced with a can of lutefisk, a fermented fish which many consider to be one of the world’s most disgusting-smelling foods.  As they pierced the top with a can-opener, their faces suddenly turned green and two of them started immediately retching into the cobblestone gutter — while in character.  It was mainly served as a dessert in Sweden, but also seemed to be a powerful weapon. 

So naturally, when Mitzy went to Sweden, I asked her to get me a can of lutefisk, and she obliged me.  

When the package arrived in the mail, I noticed that the can was entirely rounded — baseball-shaped, even. I called Mitzy. 

“Mitzy, is the can of lutefisk supposed to be baseball-shaped?” I asked. 

For about 20 seconds she was silent. 

“OK, I don’t want to alarm you, but you need to get that thing as far away from your house as possible, immediately,”  she said. “That can is about to explode.  The last time a can of lutefisk exploded on a jet, the smell was so overpowering they had to gut the entire aircraft and every surface inside it, because the smell permeated all the plastic. It cost over 2 million dollars to fix.” 

Being heavily mortgaged in a house I had just installed new wood floors in, I was now in a cold sweat, imagining that I’d have to burn it down. 

At that point in my life, I had a fabulous valkyrie of an assistant named Miss von Fuchs, who was toiling in my upstairs office.   I ululated for her, and she ran down the steps to the kitchen.  I indicated the ticking can with a pale and stricken expression. Ms. von Fuchs, ever the picture of serenity, sensibly and delicately placed the rounded can into a shopping bag, we grabbed our coats and ran out of the house, up the street towards Prospect Park.  

The entire walk over and into the park we felt like ice-truckers transporting nitroglycerine.  The thing was a legitimate biohazard. 

We eventually knotted its plastic bag and dumped it in a park trashcan some distance from the nearest residence, hoping it would be far enough away, when it exploded, not to render the neighborhood uninhabitable. 

I never heard about the city of Brooklyn needing to burn half of the Park, so I assumed it went safely to the Fresh Kills landfill, where at some point it surely exploded, hopefully nauseating nobody but seagulls. 

Such food catastrophes are no joke.  Years later, I heard tell of another such canned food mishap.  

A New Jersey dirtbag I had been dating told me the tale of two guys he knew that he called The Falcon and The Snowman.  The Falcon had earned his nickname by being a dark, hairy, beaky little man, and his cohort The Snowman was some kind of lumpy, oversized Nordic person who looked like an albino.  They lived together in a dorm room and did strange, murky things of a computer nature together.  

“Every year, the Snowman’s mom mailed him a canned ham for Christmas and he just stuck them on an upper shelf in the closet,” said the Dirtbag.  “One summer day, the Falcon said he heard a kind of popping sound, and suddenly the entire interior of their dorm room was covered in atomized shards of slimy pink meat.” 

“The Ham exploded,” the Falcon is said to have said to the Snowman. 

That’s the entire story.  

Recently my cousin sent me a Tik-Tok video that reaffirmed my belief in the danger of certain foods.  The title of the video was “Bro Casted a SPELL,” and featured a young boy denying his sister entrance into the house, and filming her on the security camera. 

“Let me in you fucking jerk,”  says the sister.  

The boy assumes his most stentorian and articulate voice, and says with perfect diction, in slow motion: “CREAM…OF…MUSHROOM…SOUP.” 

When the sister immediately vomits on herself, it is, in fact, magic. 

Cintraw@gmail.com

Artwork: “Used Gorilla,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2020