A hush descends over a crowd gathered in the yard outside the Higashi-Nakano Civic Activity Center. The silence is broken only by the sound of camera shutters.
Keisuke Nakanishi punctures the rim on a bulging red-and-yellow can of surstromming. It does not explode, and the crowd collectively breathes a sigh of relief. He slowly pries it open. Those of us at the front catch a whiff of its contents: harsh, acrid and fecal, like stepping into a music festival port-a-potty.
Produced and consumed primarily in Sweden, surstromming — literally “sour herring” — is lightly salted, fermented Baltic Sea herring. The dish is notorious for its putrid odor; other fermented fish products like Japan’s shiokara (seafood fermented in viscera) and nam pla (Thai fish sauce) are positively fragrant by comparison. You may have seen surstromming eating challenges on YouTube or even have heard of the landlord in Germany who in 1981 successfully evicted a tenant for spreading its brine in the building stairwell.