Fugu

I want to try eating fugu sometime.

Make sure the chef is skilled before ordering fugu.

Twenty minutes later, the chef has successfully prepared a whole fugu—or puffer fish—a Japanese delicacy whose capacity to maim and kill is dividing the country’s culinary world.

A sluggish swimmer, fugu has stunted fins and often flat-lying spikes instead of scales, and when confronted by predators it compensates for its lack of speed by swallowing enough water to swell up until its spikes stand on end, so it looks like an angry armored balloon.

Owing to soil erosion, some farmland has become totally barren. In Chenjiagedu Village, Fugu county, Shanxi^([sic – meaning Shaanxi]) Province, since all farmland was lost, the local people were obliged to travel several kilometers for fertile soil.

The explosion occurred in the afternoon in Xinmin, a town in Fugu County, Shaanxi Province, and by early Tuesday rescuers had counted 147 wounded, 113 of whom had been hospitalized, according to Xinhua, the main state news agency.