Eric Heimbold’s award winning documentary Blind Sushi, which screened at the Provincetown International Film Festival, takes the viewer through the forest, into a lake, and deep into the Connecticut woods in search of unique textures, seemingly inedible wildlife, and lots of wilderness thrills.

We experience these unique ecosystems through the perspective of Ryan Knighton, a visually-impaired travel writer and Bun Lai, a sustainable sushi chef who creates fine cuisine from invasive species. The camera literally dives into the water with Knighton as he paws underwater for clams. We slowly follow Lai through his purposefully overgrown farm and garden. It’s their shared love for the natural world and willingness to get dirty that brings them together, and it’s their deep friendship that the film is most interested in documenting.

Knighton began to lose his sight at age 18. This important shift in his life operated more as a motivator than a potential challenge. “Blindness was one issue,” he says, “but what scared me more was boredom.”

The documentary shows that it’s this same fearless curiosity and drive to fight complacency that also shapes Bun Lai’s attitude towards travel, environmental preservation and ultimately cuisine. “I get to see what New England looks like from its invasive side,” he jokes while the two lift up rocks during low tide and feel around for fast-moving crabs. “I can’t get used to the feeling of things coming alive that used to feel like rocks,” says a squeamish Knighton.

In addition to their love of food and the pursuit of all things external and exciting, the film illustrates that Bun Lai and Ryan Knighton are both outsiders in their own way. Lai’s legitimacy as a sushi chef is questioned by some traditional chefs since he usually sticks to ingredients that are local to Connecticut or invasive. Knighton is a self-proclaimed “sight seer” who is vision-impaired, thus likely facing the stigma and sense of otherness folks with disabilities often confront.

Director Heimbol does an excellent job controlling the film’s tone, making sure the documentary does not travel into the overtly sentimental realm of inspiration porn. A viewer might understandably feel a bit wary even by the title, possibly anticipating that the short film will simply trade on its subject’s disability for sentiment rather than depict Knighton in his nuance. This does not happen.

The documentary does not depict Knighton’s foraging in the forest and noodling deep in the water for clams as novel accomplishments. What the director effortlessly shows instead is Knighton and Lai offering each other unique insights about textures, tastes, and histories while they explore together. In the same way Lai leads Knighton’s hand to feel an invasive species of lettuce naturally growing in his garden, Knighton invites Lai to consider more closely the textures and smell of the mud from the bottom of the lake.

Usually conversations about on-screen chemistry are reserved for rom-coms and sparse, naturalistic, off-off Broadway productions. But in Blind Sushi, Knighton and Lai’s chemistry and affection for each other’s position in the world is at the center of the film. Their constant laughter and close physical interaction characterizes their relationship as dear friends rather than a strange social experiment staged for the sake of a documentary with a good concept. For this reason, Blind Sushi transcends the tired cable television tropes of travel shows with a twist and offers viewers a lively perspective on the intersection of disability, travel, sustainability, and cuisine.

Visit blindsushi.com to request access to the film for free, and to see when it’s screening next at a festival near you.

Bun Lai–chef
Ryan Knighton–author
Blind Sushi
Website
Facebook

Top image, Bun Lai and Ryan Knighton, photo courtesy of Blind Sushi

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When I interview chef Bun Lai of Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, Connecticut, he has just wrapped filming a TV series in which he travels the world creating new dishes from exotic invasive species. Think a hot, Asian Andrew-Zimmern-of-Bizarre Foods-goes-green kind of thing. On the menu? Killer bees, poisonous vipers, and stingrays.

Photo by Dominic Perri

“It’s really about having us open our minds to other ways of eating and living,” he says of the show. “Under the surface, invasive species are tied to food justice and food security.” Bun, unlike many chefs, takes the farm-to-table, or in this case sea-to-table, movement beyond trendy to his personal hope for the future of Earth and the human race.

In addition to being a James Beard Foundation-nominated chef, he is an ambassador for the healthy oceans advocacy group Seafood Watch; a popular keynote speaker on sustainable food; and a contributor to Scientific American, among other publications.

At Miya’s Sushi, Bun puts his knowledge of, and beliefs about, sustainability into exquisite practice. Not only does he work solely with ingredients that are sustainably harvested, but he also creates unique menu items that feature local invasive species not typically found on American plates.

Take, for example, locally foraged mugwort, an invasive herb originally brought here by the Pilgrims. Or Asian shore crab—which migrated en masse to North America on the ballasts of ships in the 1980s—that Bun harvests off the Connecticut coast. Or tilapia grown by students of Connecticut’s Bridgeport Regional Aquaculture Science & Technology Education Center.

Photo by Dominic Perri

Bun and his coworkers dive for ”trash fish” and shellfish on 75 acres of shellfishing grounds just 12 miles from the restaurant (which owns the fishing rights). He also has a 10-acre woodland farm 7 miles from Miya’s. “We do some growing,” he says, “but a whole lot more foraging.”

Miya’s 42-page menu is a sort of manifesto, as educational as it is mouthwatering. Kiribati sashimi is made from spear-caught (no net fishing, please) invasive Mexican lionfish, mineral-rich Kiribati sea salt, and “a dozen profoundly mouth-numbing spices.” The dish is on the menu in part to create awareness about global warming, because Kiribati, at only 8 to 12 feet above sea level, may become the first nation to be completely consumed by the ocean due to climate change.

“The purpose of food is nourishment, but not just for our bodies,” Bun says. “It’s important to understand that the ecosystem of our bodies is tied to the ecosystem of the entire planet. When we pollute one, we pollute the other.”

Photo by Dominic Perri

To promote healthier eating, the dishes at Miya’s that are healthiest for both people and the planet are deliberately the most affordable. Most cost less than five dollars, the price of a Big Mac meal—a reference point that is no coincidence and noted on the restaurant’s website.

Bun credits his parents for his passion for sustainable food and living. His Japanese mother, a nutritionist, opened Miya’s in 1982 and named it after Bun’s older sister. His Chinese father was a research doctor.

“They are the two people who have colored everything that I actually do in the cuisine of sushi,” he says. “They both had the philosophy that . . . it’s not enough to have a career. You have to have some positive impact on the world. I’m following that tradition.”

Chef Bun Lai of Miya’s Sushi grows food, but mostly forages for it, at his farm outside New Haven, Connecticut | Photo by Dominic Perri

Bun also credits the New Haven community, home to world-renowned Yale University, for influencing his cuisine. “I ended up collaborating over the years with, and being influenced by and educated by, some of the most interesting people who come from a vast array of life experiences and disciplines,” he says. “The sushi we do reflects that. It’s very multidisciplinary.”

Follow Chef Bun Lai here on twitter and facebook and keep up with Miya’s sushi restaurant here.

This article originally appeared in our September 2015 print edition.

Top photo by Dominic Perri Photography

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