Before I get into this months food shenanigans I'd just like to wish all of you a happy new year. It's already Jan 16. Maybe when Obama takes office he can do something about this time flying issue. I am excited and hopeful for the new administration. Obama is taking the job at a time which is, at least in my lifetime, the worst I can remember. Imagine if he sets things right? Or at least makes things better? One can hope right?

Another huge personal thing for me this month is the anniversary of the release of my first album Fistful Of Metal in 1984. Twenty-five years. It's hard for me to process that (time flying again). I co-founded this band with Danny Lilker in 1981 so in July it will be twenty-eight years of Anthrax for me. Who does anything for twenty-eight years?? Count the bands that have been around that long and are still making valid records and touring. It's a short list. I would have to say my "career" in heavy metal is my proudest accomplishment. Twenty-eight years of doing what I love. Can't beat that. And the album is coming along great, vocals almost done and it should be blasting your ears in June.

I was going to write an Xmas themed holiday column as I didn't get to before Xmas and over the holidays I was ruminating quite a bit on my life, my career, the holidays etc. and I remembered this event that was holiday related -- albeit Passover holiday related. So lets hearken back to a simpler time circa 1970-71. Time machine on.....

For all accounts and purposes, I shouldn't be the fan that I am of seafood. Even against a myriad number of reasons I find myself having no problem eating a shrimp head or puffer fish or any other strange thing from the sea that "extreme eater" Andrew Zimmern would eat (if I eat Tuna balls do I get my own show too?). I'm a Jew, and it's in my genetic makeup to hide like a Vampire from the sun from shellfish and besides the religious thing, seafood can kill you. Is that reason enough to not eat it? How about the fact that if you saw something that looked like a crab or lobster skittering across your kitchen floor when you turned on the lights you'd do nothing short of napalming the monstrosity.

As a kid my practicing Jewish friends would tell me horror stories about an uncle that died from a bad clam or a neighbor that got gout from a bad piece of fish. I didn't need my hypocritical shrimp cocktail eating at Bar Mitzvahs friends to tell me about the dangers of Oysters, those stories would make national news. "On tonight's nightly news with David Brinkley American troops pull out of Saigon and man that lived next door to somebody that knows Scott Ian in Bayside, Queens died from what was apparently a tainted oyster."

We used to go to my grandfather's house for the Passover holidays. Before my grandparents moved to Florida they lived in Queens as well and my memories of their house are of small dark oppressive rooms and plastic slipcovers. My grandfather was a strict Orthodox Jew and Passover was a long dark day of standing and sitting and standing and sitting and lots of oldies speaking Hebrew and my brother and I doing everything we could to sneak a piece of Matzoh without any of the Passover Nazi's catching us. On one of those long days we arrived at their house early so my parents could help out and my brother and I could suffer even longer than usual. We didn't even get the payoff of the hide the Matzoh game that all of our friends got. If it wasn't in my grandfather's seder book -- it wasn't part of Passover so there was no money exchanging hands.

On that day we got there early I was roaming around the upstairs of the house unattended exploring the mysteries of these people from Poland and Russia and I walked into a bathroom and I noticed that the tub was full of water. As I got closer to the full tub, my curiosity piqued as to why there was an old bathtub filled with water I could hear my grandfather saying, "Such a waste all this water, take a bath anyway!" This bath wasn't for me though as I looked over the edge of the tub to see a fish kind of swimming around in the tub. To say that I was surprised would be an understatement. To this day it's one of the seminal moments of my life. There was a long weird fish alive in my grandfather's bathtub. The eight year old me was extremely excited and I ran downstairs to ask about my grandparent's new pet. "Grandpa, grandpa, there's a fish in the bathtub!" And then to my horror, "Of course there's a fish in the bathtub, it's the pike for the gefilte fish."

In the dim recesses of my brain I can remember standing there confused at this statement. Pike for the gefilte fish? In your gross tub that you bath in upstairs? And then I thought about all the previous times I ate gefilte fish in that house and I think I swooned a bit. Guess who didn't eat the gefilte fish that day. It was hard enough watching everyone at the table shoveling it into their mouths and talking with mouthfuls of bathtub pike. I get gaggy just thinking about it.

You, or actually I would think that a moment like that would put me off fish forever. Tub fish -- yes. Fish from the ocean, lake, stream, river whatever -- no problem. If I could eat one type of food everyday (and afford it) I'd have Nobu Matsuhisa make me breakfast lunch and dinner.

Cheers,
Scott
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Scott Ian is SuicideGirls' monthly Food Coma columnist. Click HERE for more of his musing on sustenance and libations. He plays guitar for revolutionary metal band Anthrax and also for Pearl.