I made sushi tonight.

There was no great reason behind it. I was bicycling around doing errands when I thought, hey, if I’m in Japan, I should try to make sushi.

So I gathered up what I thought were the ingredients. Wasabi, fish, rice. Then I found a recipe for sushi rice and went back to the convenience store for vinegar and soy sauce. Just follow the directions, cut up the fish really thin, make mounds of rice and attach each slice of fish to each mound with a dab of wasabi. Done.

There’s really no great ritual to it. No school you have to attend to be considered capable of making sushi. No certificate necessary to legally make sushi. And certainly no nationality test.

Why did I mention the last part?

I grew up in a family that goes to Chinese restaurants like most other families go to IHOP or Perkins. But the good Chinese restaurants, you know? The authentic ones. The ones with them Chinese people cooking everything.

For most of my life, that was my rubric for determining if a Chinese restaurant was good. If the cook was Chinese. If they were Filipinos or Koreans making the stuff, THEN OBVIOUSLY IT’S A BAD PLACE AMIRITE.

It’s a lie, really. Whether we tell it to sound discerning and impressive in front of others or to just be plain discriminatory, it’s a lie.

Because praise be to Alton Brown, who taught us that cooking is little more than chemistry. Put the chemicals (ingredients) in the right place or in the right order, and you have the food that tastes like the food you want to make. Sure, there’s knife skills, handiwork and instinct, but all of those are refined by practice and effort. And neither of those two are racially-based.

Which is why after making biscuits and buttermilk pancakes, Alton Brown went on to teach us how to make wontons and yakitori. And yes, sushi.

This gives one freedom to a lot of things with cooking or, in a larger sense, culture. Many of my foreigner friends go to Kyoto for the maiko-san treatment, to get dressed up in a kimono and makeup for their photos. Other friends go on and participate in Japanese martial arts on the weekend (for exercise? for culture? what does it matter!). Others still do tea ceremony, or practice taiko, or a million other Japanese things. No one checks their passport at the door, nor should they.

Ethnic cooking, for some reason, happens to be one of the last things that is sacred, however. If you want sushi or gyudon or yakitori, don’t you want it prepared by the most skilled person? And wouldn’t that naturally be a Japanese person?

Why do people assume this? is my question. I’ve been cooking out of necessity since I was down to my last ten bucks in college. I know more than most people who delegate the task to other people daily. Conversely, I’m no great master in making cheeseburgers compared to the occasional Japanese person who was inspired by a trip to America once and opened up an “American-style” burger joint. We got one of those places near my work, and it’s awesome.

I still make the mistake of wondering out loud what passport a chef has when I’m at a Chinese or Korean restaurant. And I should stop doing that. In the end, the rubric should be whether the food tastes good.

My final product certainly doesn’t look as good as those prepared by a sushi chef. The shape of the mounds is too inconsistent, as is the thickness of each slice of fish. Twice, it fell apart as I held it with chopsticks. But it was good, and that’s alright with me.