In "Praise" of Natto

For weeks now, I have been asking a lot of questions and been asked a lot of questions - it's what we do when we talk to our students in the lobby between classes. It's a way for the students to practice their English, and for us to find out a bit more about our students. After talking about the usual ("How was your morning/day/weekend?" "Where are you from?" "What are your hobbies?"), the conversation invariably turns to food. I am asked how I like Japanese food, and I ask them what kinds of foods they like. Then they always ask it. I can count on it coming every time: "Do you like natto?"
When I was first asked this, I was told by my fellow foreign teachers that no, I do NOT like natto, that natto smells like it was taken from a baby's diaper. As you can see by the pictures it LOOKS like it came from a baby's diaper - a diaper that someone snagged in. Natto is actually fermented soybeans. After avoiding it for nearly two months, I decided today was the day to try it. I told my brother "Well, they say it's good for you." He said, "So are apples and oranges and they taste a heckuvalot better." All my students tell me how they eat this with rice for every breakfast and that it tastes good and is so good for you. I was getting tired of ragging on natto without tasting it first, so I decided to buy some today.
Here I am eating it during my dinner break. Yes, those are strings of natto goop hanging on between my fork and my mouth. I was horrified. They give you a little packet of soy sauce and Chinese mustard to go with it - to make it taste better, I suppose. The whole thing came in a Styrofoam carton. I must have gotten the non-smelly stuff cuz when I opened it, it wasn't bad at all. I have since learned that you can get unscented natto - which is what I must have gotten - the other stuff is horribly smelly, so they say.
There it was, this pile of rotten soy beans covered with a little paper and sat upon by a soy packet and a mustard packet. I removed the paper and strands of stickiness stretched between paper and bean pile. I was reminded of all the goop used in Aliens to put humans in those cocoons and the eggs hatching the face-huggers. I gulped, put the sauce and mustard on the natto and began to stir it with my fork. Funny thing about natto - it gets goopier and stickier the more you stir it.
I would have loved to have been around when this stuff was invented. I can just picture some Japanese woman sitting down to her soybeans that had been sitting covered in the warm summer weather for days because she forgot it. She opens the bowl and is knocked back by the smell. She pokes at it with her chopsticks and notices that it is much stickier than it was last week when she'd left the bowl there on the porch. She decides to see if it tastes as bad as it smells. She takes a bite, then she says (with strings of snotty goop webbing between her teeth), "Eureka! This tastes like a pile of crap wrapped in phlegm. People have gotta try this!"

I have another, unopened, packet sitting in my fridge waiting to be eaten. I have been told it is better with rice because some of the goop gets absorbed and thinned out by the rice - but I'm still not too sure about it.