Japan – The Obsession with Food, part 1

Japan: the obsession with food

The Japanese obsession with food is too big a topic to make only one blog entry out of it, so, I will make a food-tetralogy and publish it here within the next few weeks (or months).

The tetralogy will consist of the following installments:

1) Obsessed with freshness

2) Omiyage

3) Food Travel

4) Food TV

Part 1) Obsessed with freshness

I find it to be highly interesting that a country, which is so obsessed with food, has relatively few to no problems with obesity. Does that mean that if you care a lot about food, you don't gain weight as opposed to if you don't care about food and eat junk you bloat? That explanation is surely too easy, but I think it does play a big part when it comes down to what we eat and how we eat it.

There is no doubt that Japan is a haven for gourmets. Fresh produce is expensive, but of astounding quality and freshness. If you buy a four-pack of apples you can be sure that they are all in top shape. In contrast to many shops in other parts of the world there is no half rotten apple anywhere in any Japanese supermarket. The stuff here looks, smells and tastes impeccable. Even "mass produce" is of highest quality. In general there are no "dumps" in supermarkets where you can buy fruits or veggies in bulk. There are open apples of which you can buy as many as you want, but they are neatly lined up on foamed and shaped cartons, not thrown randomly in a big storage space like it happens in Germany or also the US.

In my home supermarket around the corner they have Brazilian mangos on a regular basis that have a label reading "export to Japan". I suppose that means the "perfect" mangoes are lined up for export to Japan, the rest gets shipped elsewhere where the customers don't mind a "non-perfect" shape and color of the fruit. Such mangoes usually cost some 400 yen, which is 4 Euro at the current exchange rate (but at times when a Euro was 160 yen that was only 2.5 Euro). I guess that's expensive, but the stuff is worth it and the people are willing to pay for good quality.

There is not one brown leaf on any cabbage or lettuce anywhere. All veggies are presented flawlessly as well.

The funniest thing (for me as a German) is single packed and wrapped potatoes. Potatoes are considered vegetables here and not a staple food and people cook one potato to put it into curry for example. One potato wrapped in vinyl closed with a golden clip is just hilarious to watch and costs an average of 50 yen. The usual size for potatoes in "bulk" is some five or six of them in a vinyl bag and they cost 200 yen. Expensive, yes, but faultless.

Even higher standards are the norm for fresh meat and fish, of course.

A couple of years ago there was an initiative where farmers sold six apples instead of four in one pack with a special sign on them saying something along the lines of "they might not look perfect, but they taste good". That didn't last. I haven't seen such offerings anywhere the past few years. There's just too much perfectionism going on in Japanese kitchens I wonder where the not so perfect apples etc. go. I hope into export or at least into animal food instead of being thrown away.

There is another thing worth mentioning about fruits. They are often given as presents to someone who is sick. For that purpose special, super expensive fruits are grown, especially melons, that are wiped, nudged or whatever every day so that they show perfect patterns on their rinds. Melons like that can cost up to 10,000 yen. And a couple of years ago someone came upon the idea to grow water melons in cubic boxes and the melons became cubes as well. I haven't seen those in a while though, guess even the Japanese thought that a water melon cube is kinda WEIRD…