a-cubed.info

Lots of things are very different in Tokyo. The food is definitely one of those things. Some familiar name brands are available, such as Twinings Tea. These provide something of a comfort value in general, providing something familiar at least. It’s sometimes a bit disconcerting, though, to find unfamiliar products from familiar brands. Food manufacturers, of course, adjust their products to local tastes. Thus in Japan we not only have the traditional British McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive Biscuits, but we also have the unfamiliar “Bitter & Cocoa” digestive biscuit. This is a digestive biscuit with cocoa in the biscuit mix itself and relatively bitter dark chocolate half-coating.

They’re quite nice, although I can see where they might not fit the UK market’s sweet tooth. The Japanese tend to go for less sweet confectionery on the whole. The downside is that they’re sold in boxes of twelve split into four packs of three. Better for my waistline I suppose, since I’m less liable to eat half the packet in one evening, but it makes them pretty expensive.

Quite a long time ago in the UK,  food manufacturers moved mostly away from the “tetrapak” system for milk, juice and such-like. These days milk comes mostly in plastic bottles and juice comes in card packs with a small plastic pouring spout with a screw-on cap. In Japan they’re still using tetrapak for milk and juice. This might be something to do with recycling (card packaging can be burnt whereas plastics release some horrible chemicals when you burn them).

Japan has been held up as a paragon of recycling in the past, but I’m wondering if they haven’t been overtaken by some Western European countries recently. In most areas of the UK we now have kerbside recycling collections of a range of packaging possibly including card, paper, tin cans, drinks cans, PET plastic bottles and glass. Certainly recycling stations in major towns have stations for the recycling of these things even if they’re not (all) collected from the house. Some places, such as the Meiji University building where I’m working, do quite a lot of separation of rubbish – into “glass, plastic and cans”, “burnable waste” and “non-burnable waste”. There seems to be little effort to recycle paper and card (it goes into the burnable waste section). At the Guest House, however, there’s only recycling of tin cans and bottles. Everything else is put in together.

In the UK, we have things called muffins and American muffins. A muffin is a small bread-like roll which is designed for toasting. An American muffin is a large Fairy Cake.

In the US they have muffins (large Fairy Cakes) and English muffins, which are sort of like the UK version but not quite. They’ve got larger holes within the bread and they toast to a much crisper, harder surface.

In Japan, you can get something much closer to muffins than an English muffin is.

Oh, and the microwave in my guest house room can also work as a toaster (it’s a bit slower than a normal electric toaster or grill but at least it works) and as a conventional oven as well.

Yesterday I got a terrible longing for a Mars Bar. Now, I don’t often eat Mars Bars. A bit too much sugar in them without anything to “cut” it with, so if I have a chocolate bar it would normally be a Snickers or something else with nuts or fruit or rice in it. I think this might be a “want what you can’t get” thing. Anyway, Mars Bars don’t seem to be regularly available here, although for some reasons Snickers often are. So, I had to settle for a Snickers instead.

On the other hand, I bought some crisps at the Yuri supermarket (literally “profitable” store, I think) today. They were “baked potato with butter” flavour. They really were, too. Yum!