I agree, it’s unnecessarily green, bulbous, and bitter. It has no place in our modern culinary culture. Probably serves better as a dildo than a food.
…oh you meant the packaging?
the land of plastic waste
I’m from a (former??) 3rd world country and it used to drive me up the wall seeing individually packed veggies with their own styrofoam case and plastic wrapping.
I’ve since gotten used to it (6months here) but I’d rather just go to a vegetable shop, just pick up the veggies and put them in my bag or have them weighed and charged by weight.
The amount of plastic I see in Japan is kind of astonishing.
It’s so they don’t crawl away.
There is some loser downvoting every comment I make LOL. Bozo I’m literally Japanese and complaining. I have every right to criticise my own country
I’ve seen individually wrapped potatoes. You’re right it’s ridiculous
Surprised the asparagus isn’t individually wrapped lol
At the same time, Japanese companies talking about SDGs, and throwing any ones that are slightly brused away
さすが日本
It sucks, but this kind of behaviour has become so normalized that it would require a huge public ground swell to push back. There would need to be campaigns and informational ads about why this is a generally dumb practice for fresh produce.
Realistically there’s no way round it other than to personally avoiding stores that do this in the first place.
One day I’m going to buy a boiled egg from the combini. I will take it out of the bag and remove it from the plastic box.
When cracking the egg open, I will find I need to remove the plastic wrapping from the boiled egg found inside the shell (a little “pura” symbol printed on it).
It’s only a matter of time.
Not on entrance exam, so brain no work good
What’s more shocking to me is that there’s no *Shohei Otani* sticker on the vegetables.
That dude is everywhere I look, on some really obscure products.
Where is that??? 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️ In my city in Japan they don’t do that. 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️
Sometimes I think I should reduce my plastic consumption but I remember I can’t do shit. If I want to cook at home and vegetables I will in 90% of the cases, have stupid and useless plastic wrapping.
I live in Japan but currently on holiday in Thailand and somehow it’s even worse here.
They peel fruit, then put it in plastic packaging.
No way I’m eating peeled fruit covered in germs that’s been sitting out all day.
After this you put each individual tray in the thin plastic bag, and then after that the plastic shopping bag
protecting/making new jobs.
Wrapping vegetables gives them longer shelf life by minimizing water loss and they stay fresh longer.
You can try this in your fridge by wrapping one set of vegetables and unwrap another and the wrapped vegetables will last a lot longer without spoiling or by getting extremely dehydrated.
Personally I don’t see much wrong in this IF you’re the kind of person who brings the plastic treys back to the supermarket to be recycled as the supermarkets are often pretty good about recycling these plastic treys which have a pretty high recycle rate.
Also plastic recycling has come a long way in the past decade or so with automation doing a good job sorting the various plastics and long gone are the days where we ship everything to China or Indonesia.
Increase your micro plastic intake a greater source for vitamins and remember to recycle but not us the room producers and manufacturers.
I’ve lived in Japan for a few years (not tokyo). Once I went grocery shopping and bought veggies and put them in my basket (obviously without wrapping them again in plastic). We’re talking bell peppers, cucumbers, broccoli, asparagus, etc.
I walked to the checkout and a japanese lady tapped on my shoulder: “aren’t you gonna wrap them? Where are you from?”. She was very friendly and spoke good english.
I told her “Germany” (I am visibly not japanese) and we started talking. “I don’t wrap them a second time, they already have an outer wrapping. At home I wash them and that’s it.”
Turns out she was a local journalist and she fucking invited me to do an interview on foreigners and our “quirks” lol. The quirk being that we don’t wrap our vegetables in plastic when shopping and this being thinkable for Japanese people. Another one was, as we discussed later for said interview, that I don’t wash my hair every day because if I did I’d have a dry blonde nest on my head. And my opinion that you don’t need to wash clothes and towels after one wear/use. Generally speaking: Staying true to the stereotype I was the unhygienic barbarian in this scenario 😅 obviously she didn’t say that, but I surely felt like it.
I have to add that this was during covid lockdown when Japan hadn’t had any tourists for over a year, so she was probably struggling to catch any foreigners for interviews. There were almost none where I lived, just very few foreign residents, mostly chinese.
Come to Czechia, we have grandmas shuffling their dirty hands in the open fruit caskets and the homeless licking off the icing on unpacked donuts. Hepatitis outbreak woo.
In Thailand yesterday they gave me a packet of hot sauce in its own little bag.
It apparently didn’t use to be like this
There was a case called the Glico Morinaga case, where poison was added to candies in stores, and the perpetrator demanded cash from the manufacturers, which led to massive losses since they had to recall the products, and the demand for them plummeted at the time
It still remains unsolved, but apparently, packaging from then on started to become more and more… like this
Someone high up has a plastic distribution plant or something connected to that. It’s why uniforms for school cost a lot of money school sports uniforms specialize shoes. It keeps friends of friends in business. At least that’s my theory.
It really does trouble me. Thankfully, I discovered a local greengrocer near me that (mostly) sells vegetables unwrapped. They leave thin bags for customers that want them, though.
That greengrocer also reveals just how much chain grocers and even other greengrocers gouge us. Example:
One plastic-wrapped iceberg lettuce at Olympic (my nearest chain): ~¥200
At the greengrocer: Three. Yes, 3!! Full iceberg lettuce of the same size as Olympic. For ¥150. Total. So ¥50 each. That’s not even the bargain bin, where they sell visibly expiring/damaged produce for deep discounts of 50% or even 75% off.
The problem I have there isn’t plastic. It’s the fact that I am single and don’t cook that much or that well. I can’t even use one lettuce before some of it goes off, let alone three.
But, unfortunately, I have yet to find a place that sells snacks and stuff on the cheap and in bulk. I’d love to see a local senbei shop selling bulk senbei and other dried snacks, but I’m still stuck buying my carbs at chains, packed on a plastic tray in a plastic bag, or worse.
And yeah. The camembert 🙄🙄🙄
There is a huge % of mentally ill people loose in japan.
I worked less than a year in a small supermarket and we had a watchlist of about 12 ill people that everyday smelled, licked, chewed, rubbed, peeled and even masturbated with produce.
I never bougth anything that is not wrapped ever since.
As an Okinawan, I am continually miffed by the continued use of the term ゴーヤ instead of ゴーヤー. The one benefit is that I know which Okinawan restaurants to avoid in mainland Japan (good: ゴーヤーチャンプルー, bad: ゴーヤチャンプル).
That amount of 燃えるゴミ i need to put out every two days is insane…
You mean selling gouya?
They have to tell the companies to be エコ and reduce waste , not to the individuals
I’ve been here for two months.
The sheer volume of plastic waste absolutely blows my mind.
33 comments
I agree, it’s unnecessarily green, bulbous, and bitter. It has no place in our modern culinary culture. Probably serves better as a dildo than a food.
…oh you meant the packaging?
the land of plastic waste
I’m from a (former??) 3rd world country and it used to drive me up the wall seeing individually packed veggies with their own styrofoam case and plastic wrapping.
I’ve since gotten used to it (6months here) but I’d rather just go to a vegetable shop, just pick up the veggies and put them in my bag or have them weighed and charged by weight.
The amount of plastic I see in Japan is kind of astonishing.
It’s so they don’t crawl away.
There is some loser downvoting every comment I make LOL. Bozo I’m literally Japanese and complaining. I have every right to criticise my own country
I’ve seen individually wrapped potatoes. You’re right it’s ridiculous
Surprised the asparagus isn’t individually wrapped lol
At the same time, Japanese companies talking about SDGs, and throwing any ones that are slightly brused away
さすが日本
It sucks, but this kind of behaviour has become so normalized that it would require a huge public ground swell to push back. There would need to be campaigns and informational ads about why this is a generally dumb practice for fresh produce.
Realistically there’s no way round it other than to personally avoiding stores that do this in the first place.
One day I’m going to buy a boiled egg from the combini. I will take it out of the bag and remove it from the plastic box.
When cracking the egg open, I will find I need to remove the plastic wrapping from the boiled egg found inside the shell (a little “pura” symbol printed on it).
It’s only a matter of time.
Not on entrance exam, so brain no work good
What’s more shocking to me is that there’s no *Shohei Otani* sticker on the vegetables.
That dude is everywhere I look, on some really obscure products.
Where is that??? 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️ In my city in Japan they don’t do that. 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️
Sometimes I think I should reduce my plastic consumption but I remember I can’t do shit. If I want to cook at home and vegetables I will in 90% of the cases, have stupid and useless plastic wrapping.
I live in Japan but currently on holiday in Thailand and somehow it’s even worse here.
They peel fruit, then put it in plastic packaging.
No way I’m eating peeled fruit covered in germs that’s been sitting out all day.
After this you put each individual tray in the thin plastic bag, and then after that the plastic shopping bag
protecting/making new jobs.
Wrapping vegetables gives them longer shelf life by minimizing water loss and they stay fresh longer.
You can try this in your fridge by wrapping one set of vegetables and unwrap another and the wrapped vegetables will last a lot longer without spoiling or by getting extremely dehydrated.
Personally I don’t see much wrong in this IF you’re the kind of person who brings the plastic treys back to the supermarket to be recycled as the supermarkets are often pretty good about recycling these plastic treys which have a pretty high recycle rate.
Also plastic recycling has come a long way in the past decade or so with automation doing a good job sorting the various plastics and long gone are the days where we ship everything to China or Indonesia.
Increase your micro plastic intake a greater source for vitamins and remember to recycle but not us the room producers and manufacturers.
I’ve lived in Japan for a few years (not tokyo). Once I went grocery shopping and bought veggies and put them in my basket (obviously without wrapping them again in plastic). We’re talking bell peppers, cucumbers, broccoli, asparagus, etc.
I walked to the checkout and a japanese lady tapped on my shoulder: “aren’t you gonna wrap them? Where are you from?”. She was very friendly and spoke good english.
I told her “Germany” (I am visibly not japanese) and we started talking. “I don’t wrap them a second time, they already have an outer wrapping. At home I wash them and that’s it.”
Turns out she was a local journalist and she fucking invited me to do an interview on foreigners and our “quirks” lol. The quirk being that we don’t wrap our vegetables in plastic when shopping and this being thinkable for Japanese people. Another one was, as we discussed later for said interview, that I don’t wash my hair every day because if I did I’d have a dry blonde nest on my head. And my opinion that you don’t need to wash clothes and towels after one wear/use. Generally speaking: Staying true to the stereotype I was the unhygienic barbarian in this scenario 😅 obviously she didn’t say that, but I surely felt like it.
I have to add that this was during covid lockdown when Japan hadn’t had any tourists for over a year, so she was probably struggling to catch any foreigners for interviews. There were almost none where I lived, just very few foreign residents, mostly chinese.
Come to Czechia, we have grandmas shuffling their dirty hands in the open fruit caskets and the homeless licking off the icing on unpacked donuts. Hepatitis outbreak woo.
In Thailand yesterday they gave me a packet of hot sauce in its own little bag.
It apparently didn’t use to be like this
There was a case called the Glico Morinaga case, where poison was added to candies in stores, and the perpetrator demanded cash from the manufacturers, which led to massive losses since they had to recall the products, and the demand for them plummeted at the time
It still remains unsolved, but apparently, packaging from then on started to become more and more… like this
Someone high up has a plastic distribution plant or something connected to that. It’s why uniforms for school cost a lot of money school sports uniforms specialize shoes. It keeps friends of friends in business. At least that’s my theory.
It really does trouble me. Thankfully, I discovered a local greengrocer near me that (mostly) sells vegetables unwrapped. They leave thin bags for customers that want them, though.
That greengrocer also reveals just how much chain grocers and even other greengrocers gouge us. Example:
One plastic-wrapped iceberg lettuce at Olympic (my nearest chain): ~¥200
At the greengrocer: Three. Yes, 3!! Full iceberg lettuce of the same size as Olympic. For ¥150. Total. So ¥50 each. That’s not even the bargain bin, where they sell visibly expiring/damaged produce for deep discounts of 50% or even 75% off.
The problem I have there isn’t plastic. It’s the fact that I am single and don’t cook that much or that well. I can’t even use one lettuce before some of it goes off, let alone three.
But, unfortunately, I have yet to find a place that sells snacks and stuff on the cheap and in bulk. I’d love to see a local senbei shop selling bulk senbei and other dried snacks, but I’m still stuck buying my carbs at chains, packed on a plastic tray in a plastic bag, or worse.
And yeah. The camembert 🙄🙄🙄
There is a huge % of mentally ill people loose in japan.
I worked less than a year in a small supermarket and we had a watchlist of about 12 ill people that everyday smelled, licked, chewed, rubbed, peeled and even masturbated with produce.
I never bougth anything that is not wrapped ever since.
As an Okinawan, I am continually miffed by the continued use of the term ゴーヤ instead of ゴーヤー. The one benefit is that I know which Okinawan restaurants to avoid in mainland Japan (good: ゴーヤーチャンプルー, bad: ゴーヤチャンプル).
That amount of 燃えるゴミ i need to put out every two days is insane…
You mean selling gouya?
They have to tell the companies to be エコ and reduce waste , not to the individuals
I’ve been here for two months.
The sheer volume of plastic waste absolutely blows my mind.
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