I haven’t had hijiki in about 5 years. In fact, I might have cooked up some of the last hijiki in Canada. Okay, that’s probably an overstatement - others probably had a better inventory than I did. I don’t think my parents were the only ones who squirreled stuff away, bought a lot on sale, and generally liked to keep a cushion of stuff in the house, a trait I share. Think I once read that holocaust survivors had that tendency, and I wonder if the uprooting and internment of Japanese Canadians - albeit a less devastating event - had a similar effect. But back to the present - last week, I again had hijiki, in a lovely little restaurant in Guanajuato, in the highlands of colonial Mexico. What a delightful surprise - both the restaurant and the hijiki.

Hijiki is a dark seaweed that resembles small twigs. It swells impressively when reconstituted in warm water, and is typically braised in liquids such as dashi (dried fish based stock), mirin (sweetened rice wine) and shoyu (Japanese soy sauce). I used to add a freelance splash of toasted sesame oil. It is often mixed with some combination of carrot shreds or gobo (burdock root) or aburage (deep-fried tofu) and toasted sesame seeds. That sweet and salty combination is a foundational Japanese combo with rice, and now that I think of it, might underlie my love of that tasty flavour hit (especially with a shot of spicy hot with it). If I ate granola bars, sweet-salty would be The Ones, and coarse salt on caramel…alas.

Hijiki is the perfect bento box item, a little mound of texture, colour and deliciousness enriching the main players. Bento is a lunch box, typically containing rice, meat or fish, and some pickles and vegetables. In restaurants it is often served in laquered boxes, take-out can be in styrofoam (that will last forever in the landfill), and homemade in divided plastic containers.

I cooked up my last batch shortly after I met Doug. It’s not a complicated dish, but the soaking and braising take enough time that it’s worth making extra for leftovers. Doug is very game for new things, and apparently liked the hijiki. When I got up for some forgotten reason, he finished the bowl. I likened it to eating all the horseradish at the roast beef buffet. That’s not exactly the right analogy, maybe because western meals don’t have the myriad tiny flavour hits. Anyway, No problem, I said, we’ll buy some more.

At Fujiya, at Clark and Venables, the clerk told me that there was no hijiki in Canada. Maybe I didn’t understand correctly. I went online to check this out. Indeed, hijiki had been banned in Canada because of the inorganic arsenic content. I thought about smuggling in hijiki from Seattle. The Japanese government defended hijiki as a traditional food, that did not have any known relationship with cancer. Did they really show there was no relationship between stomach and pancreatic cancer and hijiki? That would be quite the study, controlling for all the variables.

It seems that hijiki is like many traditional foods, once served in small quantities and now much more available because of our relative affluence and ability to choose diets that exclude whole food groups (with concentration in other food groups), and cheap transportation. According to Eden Foods, a distributor of hijiki, there are no studies of arsenic poisoning of animals or humans fed hijiki in whole form, and that testing methods using acid, including hydrochloric acid, may increase the inorganic arsenic content. Wait - acid increases the inorganic arsenic? Don’t we have hydrochloric acid in our stomachs?

Eden Foods claims, “Rather than being a source of heavy metals in the diet, sea vegetables have been shown to cleanse the body of heavy metals and other toxins.” They also point out that the traditional Japanese preparation was to soak the dry hijiki and discard the water, and “It is a well known fact that hijiki is not consumed daily in Japan (usually once every 7 to 10 days) and never in large amounts, usually 2 to 3 tablespoons including other vegetables cooked with it.” Doug had eaten a bowl, maybe a cup and a half, that is 24 tablespoons, or enough for 8 to 17 weeks (a third of a year’s) worth.

Maybe the Canadian government is right - if Canadians eat hijiki like that, we can’t have it in Canada.

But we aren’t in Canada. At Delica Mitsu, in a narrow alley off Plaza San Fernando, in the labyrinth of cobblestone, roads, alleys and plazas that is Guanajuato, there’s a deli case facing the door, with bowls of bright, fresh salads. (The hijiki is on the top row, second from the left.) The bento menu is salad based. That is my kind of menu building - vegetables rather than carbs at the base of the pyramid, salads.

Diners choose the number and types of salads they want. Some salads included chow mein noodles, or clear bean thread noodles, or potatoes, probably delicious for those who can handle the carbs. There were also mixed green salads. I chose the hijiki salad, and a red-cabbage coleslaw, with a teriyaki chicken leg, resting on a scoop of rice. It was not a big base of rice, just a tidy mound, but more carbs than I want, especially with the sticky-sweet sauce on the chicken. Next time, I’ll ask for no extra sauce on the chicken.

I like this salad-based bento idea. If you’re in Guanajuato, check out Delica Mitsu, with or without a little hijiki.