The head of Russian consumer rights watchdog Rospotrebnadzor has advised Russians not to get hooked on eating sushi and thereby avoid “gastro-intestinal adventures.”
“We are people with established traditions in food and must not fall for exotic types of food, a diet of raw food, particularly when it is not prepared by Japanese people, who have lots of experience preparing this kind of meal,” Gennady Onishchenko, Russia’s chief sanitary doctor, said on Saturday.
Onishchenko advised Russian restaurant-goers to order cooked fish, which their “genetic memory” is used to.
“There can be no fashion in food,” he said, adding that raw fish can be a source of tapeworms and other serious ailments.
During a recent inspection in Moscow, Rospotrebnadzor found violations at all 55 Japanese food restaurants it checked. It wrote up 96 violations carrying fines totaling 694,000 rubles and also filed one court case.