Food – Page 3 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Khaotan, the traditional Thai snacks that know all about you

A friend of Mrs. Adamu’s brought us these “Khaotan” puffed rice crackers – “the traditional Thai snack” according to the package. Unlike many Thai snacks, these were actually not too sweet. They had a more subtle flavor that complemented the taste of the crunchy rice without overwhelming it.

We ate all the actual crackers already (Mrs. Adamu was especially fond of them), so here’s a random picture from the Internet to show you what they look like:

Hailing from Lampang in northern Thailand, Khaotan is part of the “One Thambon One Product” (OTOP) program sponsored by JETRO, an organ of the Japanese government. JETRO provides funding and expertise to help local areas develop their products for export to places like Japan or New Zealand.

My favorite part of Khaotan was the extensive personality assessments on each face of the package. On the back is a chart of personalities based on the day of the week you were born (this day of the week system is pervasive among Burmese people as well), and a list of male/female personality types lines each side. The part about female personalities struck me as especially harsh – they have about twice as many different types as the men, but almost every type is just a different shade of dishonesty, vindictiveness, or irresponsibility. Just in case you can’t read the photos I will transcribe them for you:

The prediction according to the day of birth

Sunday: Smart at thinking and live happily until the end of life

Monday: Always cheerful and when death comes, one is supposed to be in heaven

Tuesday: Be brand and no fear of any danger

Wednesday: Clean and clear and can make dream come true

Thursday: Lots of properties and wealthy

Friday: Lots of fun till others envy

Saturday: No sad at all and has many followers

Types of male

One who is a typical male

One who is slug

One who is fed by wife

One who is a gallant

One who is inferior

One who is a sluggard

One who keeps himself from others

One who is indolent

One who is always in bad temper

One who runs away from and comes back home several times

One who cares family and relatives

One who is patient

One who has many wives

One who is praised by others

One who has hospitality and sacrifice

One who works hard for the better life of his family

One who is easy to persuade

Types of female

One who is lady

One who is dirty or lazy

One who is pregnant before marriage

One who appreciates the bandit as a hero

One who tells husband lies

One who has many lovers

One who enjoys the entertainment

One who always sleeps

One who loves complaints

One who loves to order others

One who loves to plead

One who is a liar

One who is of easy virtue

One who is too mentally calm

One who is touchy

One who is hasty

One who helps others but neglects her

One who is diligent

One who is good at words

One who participates the nonsense wander

One who blames others

One who has a big mouth

One who goes against others

One who is extravagant

One who is fierce

Why “PB” store brand products are cheap and getting cheaper

Over the past few years, supermarkets like Aeon and Ito-Yokado (and convenience stores like 7-11) have placed ever greater numbers of “private-branded” products on their shelves. Americans will be more familiar with the term “store brand” as symbolized by the suspiciously labeled cereals often with off-putting imitations of the Trix rabbit. In Japan they are simply known as “PB” (ピービー or プライベートブランド another example of marketing lingo making its way into everyday Japanese）. According to Wikipedia, reforms of the supply chain behind private brands (moving production from smaller manufacturers to more sophisticated larger firms) in the middle of this decade has led to a “boom” of higher quality private-branded items starting around 2006. In this recession, the PB goods are reportedly boosting their market shares as Japanese people give up on traditional brands.

A light-hearted economic piece from Tokyo Walker c/o Yahoo News Japan notes that some PB products, specifically those from Aeon’s “Best Price by Top Value” (what a mouthful!), are getting even cheaper than before. For example, they have started to offer “tissue refills” aka tissues without any cardboard boxes or extra packaging. Other no-frills products include laundry detergent with no plastic spoon and instant ramen with the powder already mixed in instead of coming in separate plastic pouches.

In Japan, the private-branded stuff tends to be of shockingly high quality to the point that there is little reason to pay extra for the fancy packaging of brand names. I haven’t lived in the US for about three years now, but I grew up calling store-brand food the “third world” version (the poor families drank “third world soda” and so on). However, that may be changing – A blog post at FT.com seems to show that the US is moving closer to the Japanese model, or at least Japan-owned 7-Eleven hopes so:

Interestingly, Jeff Schenck, the head of franchising for 7-Eleven in the US says [consumption of store brand goods] is more driven by distribution patterns. Big consumer goods companies such as Procter and Gamble have a greater influence over supermarket supply chains in the US than in Europe.

They are often allowed to stock the shelves in supermarkets, in return for incentive payments (known as slotting fees) to retailers, and to control the way products are displayed.

Mr Schenk said 7-Eleven’s steady development of its own supply chain was one reason why it was now confident in the potential of 7-Select products, such as its own line of potato crisps. “We call it taking our stores back,” he said.

As well as rolling out more private label goods, 7-Eleven is developing a new franchising model, which involves persuading owners of existng corner stores to convert to the brand in return for giving 7-11 a share of the revenues.

This is a less capital intensive model than its traditional practice of acquiring leases or building stores itself, before getting local franchisees to run them.

(Photo courtesy Nikkei BP)

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Check the #0066cc;">Adamukun blog for Adamu’s shared articles and recommended links.

Shocker: Japanese people prefer “Japanese food”

The Nielsen research company has conducted a global survey on dining out preferences (Japanese PDF). The Nikkei presents the results from Japan. When asked what type of food they prefer when dining out, Japanese respondents said:

Japanese (48%)
Italian (20%)
Chinese (12%)
French (7%)

Globally, Japanese food was the fifth most preferred food. Surprisingly, the 46% of Japanese people who eat out more than three times per week is only marginally above the 44% global average.

Japanese people have a comparatively high level of what I would term “gastronomic nationalism” – that is, their preference for their own food far exceeds the global rate of 27%.

Anyone who has spent any time in this country will not be surprised to see Japanese food topping the results. Inside Japan, Japanese food is simply everywhere. The children are raised on government-supplied lunches and mother’s obento box lunches, on TV there is an endless parade of B-list celebrities fawning over the latest restaurant, and on the street the vast majority of eateries are nominally Japanese. On top of that, Japanese food is objectively scrumptious and awesome, a fact not lost on people.

But what exactly is Japanese food? The survey was apparently taken based on the respondents’ own definitions of what “Japanese food” means, but this is not always so clear-cut. Under such conditions, food that might otherwise be considered foreign must have been included under the “Japanese” rubric. “Japanese food” spans a very wide variety – from obviously Japanese foods like sushi, pickled radishes, and soba buckwheat noodles to more complicated foods that blur the lines between “pure” Japanese food and fusion dishes that have developed over the years. Other foods that may have foreign origins might not be perceived as foreign by some of the consumers (yakiniku aka Korean barbecue comes to mind as I have heard some tell me it is Japanese).

For example, it’s hard to tell whether ramen would be considered Chinese or Japanese (though the recipe is distinctly Japanese, many ramen shops advertise themselves as chuuka (Chinese) and also sell gyoza, which are more or less Japanized versions of Chinese dumplings), or for that matter whether Japanese-style curry can be called Indian (it was apparently adapted from Britain, which itself adapted it from the Indian dish). And then there is the plethora of dishes that are considered youshoku (Western/occidental food) in Japan but would be hard to find on a table anywhere in the actual West. These include omuraisu (ketchup rice wrapped in an omelette) and hambaagu (a bunless hamburger often seasoned and stuffed with onions, served with a variety of toppings such as grated daikon radish (oroshi) and ponzu, a kind of citrus/soy/vinegar sauce).

Conversely, much so-called Italian food has been considerably Japanized as well (think mentaiko spaghetti), but I doubt many respondents who go into their local Capricciosa to order noodles drowned in spicy fish eggs and mayonnaise would consider themselves to be eating at a “Japanese food” establishment. Confusing things further, many “retro Showa era” restaurants serve a “Neapolitan” spaghetti-and-ketchup dishes, but in a very Japanese izakaya atmosphere. And then there are the “rice burgers” served at Mos Burger, the new soy sauce-enhanced fried chicken at KFC, and Okinawa-style taco rice (this unlike the other two would be likely termed “Japanese”). I could go on, but it’s getting close to dinner time.

So all that said, the data could be kind of biased in Japan’s case (and the same probably goes for other countries) since Japan has co-opted so much of the Western menu into its own native cuisine. As far as I am concerned, the world is all the richer for it.

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Check the #0066cc;">Adamukun blog for Adamu’s shared articles and recommended links.

Late night supermarket salarymen

Nikkei had some interesting coverage of a new social trend – men in supermarkets!

Besuited Men Begin To Haunt Supermarkets Late At Night

TOKYO (Nikkei)–Suit-attired men have become a conspicuous late-night presence at urban supermarkets. They often buy stuff for breakfast the next day or snacks to have with a drink or two before hitting the sack. At some supermarkets, late-night sales are beginning to surpass last year’s figures.

…

Most of these men buy something to munch on while they unwind with a drink or two. Croquettes, fried potatoes, packages of sliced fish as well as canned mackerel and saury sell well at these stores. Also popular are sushi, instant-noodle cups, frozen food, cut fruit and other ready-to-eat items.

One reason besuited men are haunting supermarkets late at night is the economic downturn. Japan’s armies of white-collar workers are going out to drink with coworkers and friends less often these days as they try to save money. But they are also loath to cook. “My wife fixes dinner,” one male grocery shopper said, “but I buy these snacks just for myself.”

Late-night shopping used to be done at convenience stores, but lower supermarket prices have given some night owls an irresistible choice. At supermarkets, a package of sliced tuna that goes for 400 yen during the day is often marked down to half that at night. Bread and side dishes sell for 30-50 yen less at night. “It’s difficult to ask my wife for a raise in my monthly allowance,” a man in his 30s said. “But I can cut costs by buying these discounted things.”

Could the translator have chosen the term “haunting” as a reference to the salaryman’s typically defeated, dead-inside demeanor? A blogger can only speculate.

One thing I have really noticed as a salaryman who shares grocery shopping duties with my wife is that I am something of a rare breed. Ito Yokado is overwhelmingly filled with housewives shopping for dinner, even at night. But occasionally (and I guess there are more than before but I feel like it’s been constant for at least the past year) there are the salarymen who line up with just three items – a ready-to-eat piece of food, some ostumami beer snack, and the ever-popular but morally reprehensible happoshu or other near-beer. There seem to be more of them shopping at the discount supermarket Big A than Ito Yokado, which is a more traditional supermarket/department store. In addition, Big A is where the off-duty construction workers buy their own happoshu-and-otsumami sets.

If these men are foregoing drinking sessions with their colleagues in favor of quality time at home, so much the better!

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Check the Adamukun blog for Adamu’s shared articles and recommended links.

Another reason to visit Pyongyang

Authentic Nork pizza.

In the late 1990s Kim brought a team of Italian pizza chefs to North Korea to instruct his army officers how to make pizza, a luxury which is now being offered to a tiny elite able to afford such luxuries in a country that cannot feed many of its 24 million inhabitants.

Despite the food shortages high-quality Italian wheat, flour, butter and cheese are being imported to ensure the perfect pizza is created every time.

“Our people should be also allowed to enjoy the world-famous food,” the manager of the Pyongyang eatery quoted Kim as saying, according to the Tokyo-based Choson Sinbo newspaper.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution)

My trip to Nagoya

On March 1, after 4 years in Japan, I finally made it to the country’s third-largest metropolitan region for the very first time. As far as tourist destinations, Nagoya ranks pretty low due to an almost total lack of old buildings or noteworthy landmarks, but like anyplace else there is a certain local quality, the experience of which is itself worth the visit.

In retrospect, I had perhaps one of the most peculiar two-day visits to Nagoya that anyone has ever had. The first day began with a brief Shinkansen ride from Kyoto Station to Nagoya Station, at which point Aceface picked me up in his car, took me briefly by Nagoya Castle, and then drove over to the heavily Brazilian Homigaoka public housing project. (I did a separate post on this part of the visit which you can see here.) After seeing Toyota City’s Braziltown, we made a brief stop at the Toyota City Hall on our way back to the Nagoya, where we joined Aceface’s Mongolian wife and their son, as well as Younghusband and his wife, for a Tsagaan Sar, aka Mongolian New Year, party. (Younghusband blogged about this party.) Much lamb was involved, as well as Mongolian karaoke, being made to dress up in traditional Mongolian robes, and the drinking of Chinghis (Ghenghis Khan) brand vodka.

Here is a Flickr-Flash slideshow of the Mongolian party, in which you can see me and Younghusband being dressed up (although photos with his face are left out for his blog anonymity).

Continue reading My trip to Nagoya

Schizophrenia in the baked goods section

I recently came back from my first trip to Taiwan, and while there are a lot of profound things which I will someday have to say about the country, the first thing I want to share with MFT is an image of a bakery which can’t decide whether it’s German or French.

The German French bakery by joejones on Zooomr

(It’s located in Danshui [淡水], just north of Taipei.)

Big retail winners in Japan’s downturn

Here is my list of some of the few companies that have found success during the recent economic downturn. Note their domestic orientation and low-priced offerings:

Disneyland – Multiple upward earnings revisions. Popular as alternative to international travel.

Nintendo – Record earnings. Gaming as substitute for an expensive social life. Their strategy to expand the pie of gamers through educational titles and the like has paid off enormously.

McDonald’s – Record earnings. 100 yen burgers for high school girls who want a place to chat and penny-pinching single salarymen who don’t cook for themselves

Fast Retailing – operators of cheap apparel seller Uniqlo, offering reasonably fashionable cheap clothes, plus a popular line of ultra-warm “Heat Tech” thermal underwear.

Nitori – cheap imported furniture, many convenient locations and no IKEA-style assembly requirements, no-pressure shopping experience (contrast with expensive, high-pressure Otsuka Kagu).

Tsutaya – is reporting surging new membership in their Internet rental service (similar to Netflix) is surging, while rentals-plus-online numbers have posted a sixth straight record year. People apparently spend their vacations watching the entire Sex and the City series instead of traveling to Hawaii.

Anecdotally, some of the supposedly high-end shops, such as the Caldee line of imported food stores, seem to be pretty popular. For one, the yen is strong, and for two, even relatively expensive items, are still cheap compared to the overseas trip you’ve decided to skip this year.

Writing in INSIGHT NOW!, small-business M&A consultant Shin Satake identifies four lines of business that do well in economic downturns:

1. Education services (people who have lost their jobs turn to retraining to make them more competitive)

2. Medical services (stress is a killer!)

3. Repair/maintenance (people decide to get stuff fixed rather than buy a replacement)

4. “Escapism” businesses – (the desire to escape everyday existence is a self-defense mechanism. Includes entertainment, etc.)

The original fortune cookie

This may shock you, but fortune cookies are not Chinese food, nor are they really Chinese-American food. They started out as a Japanese product, and were copied by Chinese-Americans in San Francisco decades ago to form the dessert staple of cheap Chinese restaurants across the US. (This was detailed in a New York Times article last year, and linked by Roy in a post which I somehow missed; I learned of it from watching the author of said article, Jennifer Lee, give this fascinating presentation on the evolution of Chinese food outside China.)

The predecessor of the Chinese-American fortune cookie is the tsujiura senbei, a cookie made of flour, sugar and miso which is sold at certain shrines. According to Wikipedia, it comes from the Hokuriku region. But after some Googling, I found out that these are still made and sold at the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, and since I was visiting the city anyway, I decided to track some down. Sure enough, they were being sold in a few shops near the shrine, including one shop where they were being hand-made by an old fellow with a cast iron machine (as per the NYT article, which I didn’t discover until later).

As you can see, it’s larger than a fortune cookie, and the fortune (omikuji, actually) is held by the cookie’s fold rather than inside the cookie itself. In fact, there’s another surprise inside the cookie:

Those are dried soybeans, which serve to give the cookie a pleasant rattle as you shake it around. Hence the alternative name suzu sembei or “bell cookie.” I’m sure this was intended to please a hard-of-hearing Shinto deity, or something like that, but to me it was just an interesting modification on the fortune cookie style I grew up with.

The actual fortune looks like this:

And I’m pretty sure that it’s funny when you add “in bed” to the end. Some things are simply constant across cultures…

[Updated by Roy]

Unfortunately I had forgotten to charge my camera battery that day, but I got a few shots of the cookie making process before it died. They aren’t great, but I think you can get a fair idea of it.

What Joe forgot to mention-and this is critical information-is that they are miso flavored! There was a sign in all the shop windows saying this, and advertising that no eggs are used. Trying for the vegan market?

Pizza by the slice coming back to Japan!

Great news: Sbarro will be opening in Tokyo (presumably) in the near future! Sbarro doesn’t exactly have the best reputation in the US, it is still entirely passable pizza-by-the-slice. Welcome back!

Though they did not announce exactly when the first store would open, their plans are to open 18 shops in rapid succession in their first year of business. That’s a thankful departure from the Cold Stone Creamery and Krispy Kreme Donuts strategies of pumping up excessive demand for a tiny amount of shops in an effort to generate buzz. So rather than the painfully annoying KK lines in Shinjuku and Yurakucho, here is hoping the Sbarro chains will be as accessible as they are back home.

clipped from www.nni.nikkei.co.jp

U.S. Pizza Chain Sbarro To Re-Enter Japan

TOKYO (Nikkei)–Sbarro Inc., a major U.S. pizza chain operator, will take another shot at the Japanese market, opening its first outlet as early as April in the Tokyo area, The Nikkei learned Friday.

Sbarro and consulting firm JCI Inc. are expected to set up a 50-50 venture capitalized at 10 million yen by the end of February. They plan to open 18 directly run restaurants by the end of next year and a total of 125 shops, including franchise outlets, in five years.

Founded in 1956 in New York, Sbarro has over 1,000 restaurants in 43 countries. It entered Japan under a franchise system in 1997 but pulled out in 2001.