Saturday, January 26, 2008

Japan and Food

If there has been one thing that I've noticed in the time that I've been here in Japan, it's that Japanese people LOVE their food. And food is pretty much everywhere. And every region here in Japan has some sort of food that is unique to that area. When I first got here my host-mom gave me a map of Sagamihara city and on the back of the map was a list with pictures of food that is unique to Sagamihara.

And when you turn on the TV, you can find food on just about any TV show. In the morning there's the news and they feature food from different stores. In the evenings they have game shows where they always somehow manage to incorporate food into the program. For example the other night all of these celebrities were divided up into teams and they had to go into a room and pick a different type of food to go into a smoothie. Nobody knew what the others had picked and it usually turned out gross, but they had to drink it anyway. And travel shows are the same, food is an important part of deciding where to go apparently.

And Japanese people seem to just eat a ton of food! And it's just not fair that they stay as thin as most of them do. Here are some pictures of what I get for dinner sometimes:



Sorry for some of the gross pictures. Do you see the crab that we got from that tour? The first two pictures are of sukiyaki. They use a raw egg for that, so I wouldn't suggest trying it in America. The next four images are from one meal. The crab was just fascinating. The next three are from a sushi restaurant and, yes, that is a shrimp staring at you from my bowl of miso soup. The next two pictures are from when it was warmer, my host-dad grilled these fish out in the backyard. The little bones were a nightmare, though. The next picture is the famous tempura, yummy! The last picture is of yakisoba, which is uber-delicious and the one before it is of some kind of cake they had at this Italian restaurant we have near the university.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Dammit...coming across these pictures is about as bad as coming across Iron Chef at 3 AM. I'm absolutely starved with no access whatsoever to the food.

Unfortunately, I do have a policy of not eating anything that can still give me the sad doe eyes AFTER being cooked. Still, everything else looks crazy delicious!