OK, it’s not actually linguistics (just another dumb headline), but come on, “Super-salty pizza sends six kids to the hospital in Japan, linguistics blamed” (by Casey Baseel, SoraNews24) is a great story, and it does deal with Japanese:
Pizza, famously, is hard to screw up, so much so that “_____ is like pizza. Even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good,” became shorthand for things in which acceptable quality is very easy to find. Here’s the thing about something that’s hard to screw up, though: When someone does somehow manage to screw it up, it’s probably going to be really, really bad. Case in point, a half-dozen teens in Japan recently sat down for some pizza, then ended up in the hospital from it. […]
The students had used a from-scratch recipe, with the task for some of the students being to make the dough for the pizza crusts. If you’ve never made pizza dough, you might be surprised to learn that salt is a crucial ingredient. […] The recipe the students were following called for three tsumami of salt. Tsumami is the noun form of the word tsumamu, which means to close the fingertips around something. In other words, “three tsumami” would mean “three pinches” of salt.
However, according to a statement from the Kitakyushu Board of Education following an investigation, the students in charge of making the dough weren’t familiar with the term tsumami, at least in this cooking context, and used a lot more. It’s unclear exactly how much salt they put into the dough, but they might have gotten confused by tsumami’s connection to tsumamigui, a combination of tsumami and an alternate pronunciation of kui/“eating.” Tsumamigui means to “nibble” on something, but by extension it’s also often used when talking about snacking on finger foods, where the image of using just the fingertips can sometimes get a little less ironclad.
With that in mind, it’s likely that the students in charge of making the dough took the recipe’s “three tsumami of salt” to mean not three pinches, but three handfuls, and so the dough contained an amount of salt several magnitudes larger than it was supposed to. Regardless of the exact nature of the misinterpretation, the six students who were hospitalized after eating the pizza were found by doctors to be suffering from symptoms caused by excessive sodium intake.
Thanks, Scopulus!
So is this the Japanese-recipe equivalent of the Spinal Tap “Stonehenge” scene in which 18′ and 18″ had gotten confused?
By George, I believe it is!
Way too much salt, and they couldn’t taste it right away?
I’m guessing there was beer involved.
“To alcohol – the origin and the solution of all of life’s problems!”
– Homer Simpson
Please, that’s “The cause of—and solution to—all of life’s problems.“
The article contains a link to a perhaps more cosmically-important Japanese-pizza story. https://soranews24.com/2026/01/14/kitkat-pizzas-are-coming-to-pizza-hut-japan/ They’ve come a long ways since 50 years ago when I was a kid living in Tokyo and “cuttlefish” was the most exotic local topping at the Shakey’s in Roppongi.
I obviously read this as three tsunamis of salt, which would presumably be quite a lot.
I kept reading it as “three tsunamis of salt” as well.
I also wonder whether a tsumami is really supposed to be closer to a pinch or to a dash (which is officially supposed to be two pinches). Either can be measured between two fingers, although I also have an actual measuring spoon for the latter, which I used just last night for both the cayenne pepper and Worcestershire sauce in a parsley-based salsa verde recipe. (The spoon is not labeled “dash,” of course, but “1/8 tsp.”)
Yes, I read it as ‘tsunamis’.
But what Lars said. How much beer do you have to drink to fail to notice that much salt? And aren’t they actually suffering alcohol poisoning? The symptoms seem similar. Blaming the sodium is a euphemism?
The spoon is not labeled “dash,” of course
Sets of measuring spoons marked “dash”, “pinch”, “smidgen” etc. are not rare.
I would not use my fingers for a pinch of cayenne pepper. Hijinks would be apt to follow.
I knew something seemed wrong!
(Auf den Alkohol! Den Ursprung – und die Lösung! – aller Lebensprobleme! But I had heard the original, too.)
Speaking of tsunami, I just encountered title wave. I wonder if that’s even an eggcorn.
Here’s the original link
https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/national/20260210-GYT1T00579
https://www.city.kitakyushu.lg.jp/files/001192324.pdf
This is the city report which has more details.
I really doubt beer was involved as it was in a school. As a tsunami is about one or two grams, and cheese and pizza dough hide salt flavoring quite well, I imagine they kept adding, thinking no big deal and ended up with a teaspoon or so.
Basic hospital blood work will tell you which electrolytes are out of their correct ranges, and testing for excessing alcohol in the blood at the same time is also trivial. So I don’t think this could be a mistake for alcohol poisoning.
On the other hand, would take a lot more than Ook’s suggested excess teaspoon of salt in the dough to lead to hospitalization. That would require something like two or three tablespoons per person—an amount that could taste so bad as to be physically difficult to swallow.
And indeed it was not poisoning. Likely students felt unwell and went to hospital as a precaution. Doctor comment in the report: 「塩分摂取により一時的にナトリウム過多となり、体調不良を引き
起こした可能性は否定できない」
“it cannot be denied that the salt intake temporarily led to excessive sodium, which caused the students’ poor health”
testing for excessive alcohol in the blood at the same time is also trivial
I treasure the memory of a medical student in the casualty department asking, regarding a blood alcohol result we had got back, “what’s the normal range?”
If the robo-translate is to be trusted, the only specific symptom mentioned was nausea. They did notice it was very salty. There was a home ec class divided into several groups, and somehow there was miscommunication in one of them.
Beer indeed, you cynics. Those are teenagers.
I think, among pizza’s many strengths, is its ability to Trojan horse ingredients onto your palette that would otherwise be quite conspicuous. Most people who haven’t bothered to look into it might be surprised to learn just how much salt and even sugar are in “normal” pizza. Add to that the high background levels of salt in any Japanese meal, and the tendency of teenagers to eat horrifying amounts of things despite their bodies’ best efforts to warn them off it, and you have a recipe (sorry) for disaster.
Beer indeed, you cynics. Those are teenagers.
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of older teens at a party or something making a mistake with homemade pizza because they’d had too much beer, at least in the U.S. (I don’t know about Japan), but junior high students in home ec are a different matter.
I don’t believe this story. I very much doubt whether it is possible to cause hypernatraemia directly* by eating oversalty pizza, no matter how many tsumamis of salt may have gone into it.
Pics of the blood test results or it didn’t happen.
* I can certainly believe that the offending pizzoids may have caused profuse vomiting, though, and that might lead to clinical dehydration, which would put your plasma sodium up – along with your plasma everything else.
Actually, profuse vomiting would tend to cause hyponatraemia, thinking about it. So probably not.
But I remain sceptical. Kids made themselves ill enough to end up in hospital, sure: but the rest smells of journalistic misunderstanding and/or embroidery.
I got the impression (again, messy robo-translate) that this was during home ec class. So, I suppose, a kid barfed, teacher figured out the salt issue, and out of caution sent them to the ER, where the doctors wrote a report and probably told them to drink some water and eat some food.
I have had some intensely salty pizza: anchovies, capers, olives, maybe some of the above unrinsed. Not so salty that I’d hate it.
The Danish food authorities seem to have had some success working with food packagers to reduce the salt content of finished products on the shelves. Their guidelines say that an adult should get less than 5 grams of salt per day. (Note that’s salt, not pure sodium as it seems to be expressed in the US). I don’t think I’m quite there myself yet, but we’re working on it.
So when I see an Italian pizza recipe with 10g of salt in the crust and 10g in the sauce, I wonder if I’d even be able to eat it now. 40 years ago, no problem. (Admittedly that was for 4 diners, but then it would probably only be one of several courses).
Since my wife got diagnosed with hypertension, we’ve cut down heavily on the amount of salt we use in our cooking. Oddly, while my wife now often finds food at restaurants etc. too salty, I don’t. (And no, I don’t eat out significantly more often than her.)
(My own tendency is towards hypotension, but apparently while a high salt diet can exacerbate high blood pressure, it can’t alleviate low, so as long as I get essential electrolytes a low salt diet isn’t bad for me.)
When I’d just moved to Italy and my Italian was still shaky, my roommate (who had never baked anything before) asked for my bread recipe. It was a simple one, so I called it out to her from the other room. Except that I said tazzine (espresso cups) when what I meant by the misapplied diminutive was scant tazze (cups). About ten minutes later she called me into the kitchen and I found her “kneading”—with two or three fingers—a tiny blob of dough. “It’s going to get a lot bigger when it rises, right?”
Long live kitchen scales and other actual measuring devices.
> three tsunamis of salt
Come to think of it, ‘tsumami’ could be portmanteau of ‘tsunami’ and ‘umami’…
It’s correct to blame “linguistics”. The Universal Grammar model breaks down when confronted with Japanese cooking terms.
the rest smells of journalistic misunderstanding and/or embroidery.
Are you trying to shake my faith in clickbait?!
A question on the Japanese in the doctor’s note quoted above. I gather Japanese for sodium is にナトリウム. Which makes sense ie natrium. But why is the na in hiragana while the rest of the word is in katakana? Seems odd to mix scripts within the same word?
Only the last 5 kana – ナトリウム natoriumu – is ‘sodium’. The first kana, に ni, is a particle.
I bet the students figured out their mistake first, and headed to the doctor as a precaution later – not because they experienced any ill effects but because they started to worry how much sodium is safe.
We are also assuming that all these kids were starting this experience from a rest state of normal diet, hydration, and activity level. As these are teenagers, their default state before eating the salty pizza may have been ramen, caffeine, and sleep deprivation.
I am now vaguely recalling that we may have made pizza dough from scratch in Home Ec when I was in 7th grade (1977-78).* I did learn somewhere along the way (not necessarily in that class) that yer most basic non-fancy dough has four ingredients: flour, water, yeast and salt.** I guess that doesn’t necessarily mean that I have any good sense of how much salt proportionate to the amounts of the others.
*After a wave of reform had made it mandatory for boys as well as girls; before subsequent waves of reform took it out of the curriculum for everyone in many places.
**Cursory googling confirms that the salt is not just to make it taste better (if not overdone), but affects the chemistry of how the yeast interacts with the gluten in the flour etc. In a positive way given the usual desideratum of breadmaking, but presumably in a negative way if you use too much.
@jwb
How does that kind of low-fat dough work? I would expect something like 12 Flour : 4 Water : 1 Butter/oil : 1 Yeast : 3/4 Sugar : 1/4 Salt for a normal-fat dough.
Standard pizza dough has no fat in it. In Italy it doesn’t have any sugar at all, either, since one usually employs yeast cubes rather than proofing dried yeast. I lightly grease the top of my ball of dough to keep it from drying out too much, but that’s it. Hell, even most bread recipes don’t have fat in them. And that would also be far too little water; 65-75% in proportion to the flour (by weight) is standard. What you’re describing sounds more like a cracker to me.
Salt is not technically necessary, it’s just that the bread or pizza will taste like crap to most people without it and will have a slightly different texture. I still loathe the completely saltless, spongy bread in Tuscany except in certain recipes, and that’s true of almost anyone who didn’t grow up here. Florentines will claim that their bread is the best, but the rest of the world just stares at them and says they should stick to bragging about art.
Also, nobody I know puts salt in pizza sauce (which is not really sauce, just saltless tomato puree and some oregano sprinkled on top). The salt in the mozzarella is plenty. Of course, I exceed my sodium limit with the anchovies.
At this point someone surely has to quote that Tuscan, Dante, on exile:
Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
lo scendere e’l salir per l’altrui scale.
(Thou shalt prove how salt the savour is of other’s bread; how hard the passage, to descend and climb by other’s stairs.)
Sure, you can say (in English, at least) that what the Florentines make w/ saltless dough is a kind of “bread” just as you can say that what the Jews make for Passover w/ yeastless dough is a kind of “bread.”
In some cultures, of course, there is a traditional symbolic linkage of bread with salt external to the dough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_salt
At this point someone surely has to quote that Tuscan, Dante, on exile
Thanks for that — I’ve known the quote for years, but never realized that he had been used to saltless bread!
Come to think of it, given the way my brain’s free-associative capacities work, maybe the essential place of salt in recipes for dough was easily recalled because salt-as-an-ingredient is explicitly mentioned in the first verse of what is undoubtedly the Sixties’ heaviest-and-grooviest rock song about baking bread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22iu_TQ6Vo0
Fat makes the crumb more tender, but it isn’t necessarily required for bread. “Fats help to keep breads from drying out quickly because they hang on to moisture (that’s why the fatless French bread stales in a day)” —Jane Brody’s Good Food Book (1985). (A sentence I remember because of the effective use of “stale” as a verb.)
Interesting that its first sense was “To render (beer or ale) ‘stale’” (1826 “A stock of old porter should be kept, sufficient for staling the consumption of twelve months.”)
And then of course there’s the other verb stale “To urinate, said esp. of horses or cattle” (1903 “Cattle-dung where fuel failed; Water where the mules had staled; And sackcloth for their raiment” R. Kipling, Five Nations 150), “Of uncertain origin. Perhaps a borrowing from French.”
@kts
Ok, I will continue with the fat, because when I make dough, I usually make enough for two pizzas and put half of it in the fridge.
This reminds me of the no-salt whole wheat bread at Strawberry Fields, the healthy hippie food store in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in the ’80s. (I see it’s still there!) it wasn’t my favorite of their excellent whole wheat breads, but it didn’t taste like crap to me or need quotation marks.