SLOW CHOW IN THE FAST LANE
or: You Put that on your Sushi?

If you’ve spent any time in Japan and so have tasted genuine traditionally brewed shoyu (soy sauce), there is no returning to the mockery that is LaChoy. Shoyu (and especially its earlier form, tamari) becomes an item and a subject dear to your heart.

For millennia, the Japanese have been making this sauce the traditional way, using the natural process of fermenting a blend of soybeans, water and koji for several months in specially made wooden vats to achieve the flavor peak-- the slow chow summit.

To make a wide story narrow: who has the time for that slow stuff anymore? Some entrefarceur came along and slapped together trainloads of hydrolyzed soy (or other!) protein, a few cargo containers of flavor enhancers and some tanktruckfuls of artificial coloring to make overnight what unknowing consumers in other countries call "soy sauce" (at which the Japanese laugh up their kimono sleeves, much as the French chuckle into their berets at Newark Camembert). Thus began the Shoyu Wars, which have been raging spicily for some time now. And things are not getting simpler.

Few have heard of an organization called the International Hydrolyzed Protein Council, which supplies the elemental falsehood (at least it’s the remnant of a protein) that goes into “soy sauce,” a non-brewed fingersnap containing caramel color, corn syrup, salt and hydrolyzed soy (or "other" (unnameable!)) protein. This brownish, salty, uncertain liquid is to genuine shoyu / tamari as kerosene is to Chardonnay. A difference reflecting the fact that some societies have time-honored traditions to maintain and are still sticklers for quality and considered action - native yearners for the real thing - whereas some societies (perhaps ultimately even Japan itself) don’t seem to have the time.

In any case, the IHPC has justified its position by observing that its soy swill sauce has been selling for decades now, and no consumers have complained. Perhaps there has been no complaint because they know no better, or maybe they are no longer living - who really knows - but the consumers anyway deserve the brush-off for buying such stuff with no questions asked, in the fastfood manner.

Not surprisingly, the Japanese want genuine soy sauce, made in the traditional way, to be the international standard, which is what anyone in his or her right mind would want, but the Right Mind category seems to exclude the folks who make the faux sauce and the folks at the IHPC, who supply the chemo that covers up the octane. They want the standard to read something like: “Soy sauce shall be defined as anything that has 'soy sauce' written on it." Big bucks there.

And a slap in the face to tradition, quality, care, nutrition, integrity and all that other useless baggage that just slows us down as we careen headlong through the Fast Century.

THE RECURRING SURPRISE OF NO DESSERT

I've been living in Japan for quite a while now and have gotten so used to the Japanese style of eating, and to the absence of any form of what even long-term expat Americans like myself at the end of their meals would honestly refer to as "dessert," and to the absence of any form of dessert-focused foodstands along the roadways of this well-driven land, like the Carvels etc. of my early years in America and the Ben & Jerry's and Cheesecake Factories of today, that I'd come to consider myself free of those calorific chains.

The early years in Japan were pretty frustrating, though, to a native pie-and-ice-creamist - if I wanted any dessert in 1972 Japan, I had a choice between a small dish of canned fruit or a golfball of ice cream (i.e. vanilla; hasn't changed much since). A request for chocolate was like asking if they had any moon fragments on the premises.

As a result of protracted denial in extremis, the Japanese approach slowly became my way of life, and over the decades I stopped associating the meal terminus with a sweet explosion. Indeed, dessert seems repellent to me from here, though when I go back to the states I usually have to try my teeth on pie a la mode at least once after an American-sized meal (enough to make it across the continent in a wagon train), to see if I can still believe I used to do that every day. Each trip, it gets harder to believe.

Generally speaking (when speaking of dessert, always leave a loophole), dessert now strikes me not so much like a chocolate creme pie in the face as somewhat of a death-defying practice, to top off an adequate meal (80% full stomach) with a calorific time bomb, and every time I go back to America I behold in the flesh the results of the great national dessert experiment. So I would have thought that by now the hefty finale would be fully alien to me, well erased from my way of being, but as I found out from within not long ago, I remain American at the core.

It happened not long ago, when the family went to a local restaurant that's part of a Japanese countryside food chain whose menu we enjoy when we're on the road-- all kinds of fish and vegetables cooked in all kinds of country ways, just good plain food. It's the kind of setup where you select your own dishes from the simple, tastefully prepared choices on offer in the bright, roomy place, you go along the counter and take the dishes you like, request rice and miso shiru and can heat up whichever of your selected dishes in a microwave if you so desire...

But this day, as I was cruising along and had reached the end of the offerings - the point at which only the water/hot tea selection remained - I was filled with a vestigial yearning, but I didn't know what for, as I stood there holding my small tray, in that kind of trance like when you reach the top of the stairs and stand there wondering what you came upstairs for... then it hit me like a ton of cellulite: there were no desserts!

There were no pies, no cakes, no cupcakes, no cookies even, no key lime pie, no brownies, no pecan pie, no fudge, no tubs of ice cream, no banana splits - no sundaes at all - no Devil's Food, no mousse, no banana cream pie, no New York cheesecake - my mind went automatically down the long list that I merely high-point here - no lemon/raspberry/chocolate syrup or whipped cream to heap atop any or all the aforegoing, no hard or soft candies even, no chocolate milkshakes or ice-cream sandwiches, not even a frozen Mars bar-- about the closest thing to all that arterial delight was a dish of fried sweet potato slices, and for a surreal moment I felt lost in that dessertless place, a foreigner in a strange land… I shook my head to clear it of empty-caloried visions, lamented the absence of ginger ale and got some water.

While working to enjoy my simple meal with nothing at the end of it, my old American appetite and I observed the many Japanese customers go through the line; not one of them, not even the kids, looked lost at the water. They were born here.

MEGATERIYAKI REPELLENT?

While I'm on the subject of aggressive food, thought I'd take a brief tangent into the flavor lab of Dr. Bizarro and mention the cucumber soda that's coming out, here in Japan only, for this summer only. Pity for you folks living abroad and in other seasons.

You'd have to go a long way in my brain - assuming there's any traversable distance in there at all - before you might stumble across a couple of meme fragments you could cobble together into something resembling the idea of a cucumber-flavored soft drink. In fact I think you'd only find it outside my brain, and perhaps only in the brain of a Pepsi exec. It's one of them who came up with liquid cucumber in a PET bottle as a cool concept for a summer drink. My personal feeling is that cucumbers should flavor themselves and little else. But this is big biz, big test marketing and lots of press action, though mostly on the Huh?? end of the spectrum.

In keeping with the genuineness of the times there is no actual cucumber in the drink, or even cucumber coloring, it's completely artificial, except maybe for the water, but even that, who knows. Perhaps it could be used to fend off an attacking Megateriyaki.

I think I'll have try one though, just to rein in the restless edges of my disbelief. Besides, the chance may never come again. But I'll be very impressed if I'm even slightly delighted.

SUPERSIZING

Japan style...

DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW?

According to the McDonald's PR, out of sheer integrity (we can't stand keeping the consumer in the dark even one second longer than 50 years!) the burgermonger is at last going to tell its customers exactly what they're eating, right on the wrapper. I kind of doubt it, though.

Surely they're not going to say that this very quarter-pounder you're about to add to your body comes from cattle raised on factory farms where the animals have been weaned on cow blood, injected or medicated with antibiotics and growth and other hormones and fed genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton seeds laced with slaughterhouse waste and tainted animal fats while standing and sleeping in their own waste for two years?

I don't think that'll wrap the Mac. The wrapper will say in tiny letters (that no hungry scarfer will ever pause to read) scientific-sounding stuff like: Big Mac Calories: 560, Carbohydrate: 47g, Total fat: 30g, Saturated fat: 10g, Salt: 1.3g...

What the labels should say in big red letters all over the place is simply "Believe us, you don't want to know."

OCA

STEAMING POCKETS

Walking down the early morning street in the big city on my first day back at the office in the new year, my mind in that kind of hapless fog it enters when, in all its ancient innocence of having gotten up more or less around dawn for the past ten days, it is one day (for no reason it can truly understand) gotten up very early in the morning and dressed up and put on a train from the clear, bright, quiet countryside and taken off the train into the darkly roaring canyons of a vast Asian metropolis rivered with strangers zipping here and there on errands that appear to involve life and death, my coat pocket soon steaming warm from the Japanese fast-food breakfast I've purchased for myself (I've minimized meat and dairy in my diet for over 40 years now, but "That which is never broken is not a rule" is one of my more adhered-to mottoes, so I got a couple of nice warm steamed meat and curry buns to have for breakfast) and thus it is that I find myself on the way to the office, pockets steaming as I say, meditating upon the comparative qualities of Japanese and American fast foods (Big Macs! Bucket-o-Chicken! Barrel-o-Coke!) and finding therein the very width and breadth and gravity of many of the problems that beset the world today.

Japanese fast foods (I refer to traditional Japanese fast foods here, the modern ones being essentially indistinguishable from those of America, except perhaps in the packaging) tend to be lighter and more natural, involving fewer stages of refinement. The Nikuman, for example, is a fluffy steamed bun cored with a stew of meat and costs less than a dollar. It's hot, fast, tasty, filling, low in calories and easy to find at all hours. (For simplicity, I'm leaving out all the other stuff that dietary pain-in-the-necks like myself often decry, like additives, preservatives, organics etc., also in the firm belief that just about anything is ok-- in fact, quite delicious-- once in a while).

There's no real American equivalent to the Nikuman. Nor is there any real American equivalent to the Taiyaki, another of my street-sold winter favorites, a crispy mold-baked fish-shaped crepe-dough filled with a paste made of sweetened adzuki beans. Warm and tasty, natural winter street food, and the vendor is always interesting. Another favorite is the pebble-roasted yakiimo (baked sweet potato), still sold from singsong trucks that slowly wend the winter nights. Great handwarmers as you eat the steaming and nourishing sweetness. Food built for the air and the season and the body. No American equivalents there either. So I guess there's no comparison after all. Maybe the US could gain something, as it were, from fast food like this.