Food in Mouth

Junk food from Japan is the new sex

This week my sister had some extra candy she got from a friend who's visiting from Japan. And that's how I became acquainted with peach flavored Kit Kat bars and giant Pocky. You're probably thinking that peach flavored Kit Kat bars sound really weird and you would be right. I'll get into more details about that later. Do any of you know where to even find something like this in New York? Because even though it was kind of weird, I want to have more of this stuff.

The giant Pocky is pretty much what you think it is. Pocky with giant disease. It's quite a bit taller and wider than a regular stick of Pocky. It still is a cookie in a stick form, covered with some chocolate for 3/4 of the cookie. I don't think one could eat a whole box of giant Pocky's though because they would be overkill.

Normally one would expect bigger version of a good thing to contain more goodness. However, the giant Pocky, while delicious, is not as good as regular ones. Regular sized Pocky sticks have a better chocolate to cookie ratio, and in the giant version, you just get a lot more cookie. No offense to cookie lovers, but me loves chocolate on a stick.

Best part of the snacks from Japan were the Kit Kat bars. Normally in the U.S., they're covered in milk chocolate. Here we see them in two different peach flavors. Yellow peach and white peach. The yellow peach one had a stronger flavor than the white peach one. These things aren't as addictive as the normal milk chocolate version of Kit Kats, but I could see how if you filled my cubicle with peach Kit Kat bars, it would be easy to be a convert. Addiction is a beautiful thing, when we're talking about candy bars from foreign lands.

Today I heard about someone who wants to label food as the new sex! See here. It's talking about how we view food the way we used to view sex. Supposedly we're fussy about food now, constricting ourselves with complex constraints about organic and sustainable and blah blah. Meanwhile we're less fussy about sex. "The rules being drawn around food receive some force from the fact that people are uncomfortable with how far the sexual revolution has gone -- and not knowing what to do about it, they turn for increasing consolation to mining morality out of what they eat." Nothing like hearing a republican tell us the sexual revolution has gone too far... shades of Ann Coulter.

I really don't think that's what's happening with food. It just so happens that some people who do love food a lot care about where their food comes from. This is not everyone. Most of my friends love food and love to eat food. Like me, they don't give a fuck where it's from. You could carry Kit Kat bars on a carry-on luggage and burn some jet fuel, or float me over some pocky snacks on a giant shipping vessel. It really is no difference to me. It just so happens that the people who care about where their food comes from, they are very vocal. The Alice Waters and the Dan Barbers. I think the other thing is that in a fast moving world with everyone leading complex lives, it can be a comfort to be immersed in something to call your own. Look, there are people who comfort themselves with the latest gadgets and keep up with contrast ratios on LCD tv's. Or people who know about the minutia of goofy sunglasses and skinny jeans and whatever style is in play right now. The only difference is that gadget folks and fashion people aren't telling the rest of us that shoddy LCD screens and fashion faux pas is going to ruin health care in this country and lead to an obesity epidemic.

To recap. Are Kit Kat candies like sex? Oh hell yes. Is food the new sex and are people making a fuss about it because people need consolation about the sexual revolution? Um.. maybe that's stretching it a little.
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Posted by Danny on February 27 2009 at 1:17 am