okizuke sounds so tasty, but it’s always a bit…off-putting when they casually and cheerfully do “animal torture” cuisine varieties
Yeah, there's definitely a bit of disconnect between the consumer and the chef a lot of the time. For many chefs, the 'torture' part isn't torture, it's just another cooking technique. In the case of okizuke, the technique is allowing soy sauce to circulate throughout the squid's body through natural means. Ultimately, we just have to understand that some people do not see food animals with the same emotional lens as they would people. We can't label them 'cruel' just because of that, it's a different way of life.
It is also still fine for me to feel uncomfortable with this cooking process and not want to eat it.
And lest we think this is a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, I'd like to remind that foie gras exists. Gavage is also often seen as just 'another cooking technique', to enrich the goose livers.
