The land of abundance
18 Dec
Everything in Australia is big and sprawling. I swear I feel dizzy from all the space and how much more you get. There’s a frugal philosophy that you naturally embrace in Tokyo because everything is spare, narrow, and so little of.
I’m drunk on space and size.
We landed around 2pm in Sydney after a 22-hour overnight journey from Tokyo, so after a short nap, we thought we should do the right thing and load up on groceries at his mum’s place, so off we went to Woolworths, which is a big chain in Oz.
Rows of produce greeted us.
The aisles were so wide that you couldn’t bump into anyone even if you wanted to. In my humble Akasaka supermarket, my shopping basket often brushed against products and elbows. “Sumimasen (Excuse me)” is so oft a murmur that it’s like background noise.
Check out the size of this capsicum — almost bigger than my hand. The kangaroo and I proceeded to compare prices with Tokyo and chuckled over how cheap and how much more we got. The Aussie dollar is faring badly, but it’s good for us during this festive season.
Photo: monkeyc
The variety was astonishing. I’m so used to just having one or two options in terms of brand or variation. For example, soymilk. It’s just “processed” or not “processed” (I’m not sure what it means but I always choose non-processed which I think is unflavoured) in Japan but in Australia, there’s non-fat, low-fat, flavoured, unflavoured, omega fatty acids, calcium and vitamin D fortified, genetically unchanged (whatever that means) etc. My head was spinning and no wonder it took us longer than usual to grab our stuff — it was a labyrinth of stuff.
Photo: electrongirl
I also couldn’t get anything small. Although there are two of us to feed, we’re not going to be around that long. I had no choice but to buy some jumbo sized box of oats because that was the smallest. I probably would need the kangaroo to help me lift the biggest packet available. I wish I took pictures but I was feeling completely under the weather and it did feel weird taking photos in a supermarket.
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Yeah, we have much bigger packages of stuff at our supermarkets. Woolworths are generally bigger, nicer, better organised and better stocked than the competition.
The small food packages in Japan are like those in HK. I think that it might have something to do with the fact that people here are somewhat larger and eat more, and perhaps more importantly, have more space at home to put things! Given how small most places in Japan are, where would you put big packets of food?
Chris, I just don’t buy big packets of food in Tokyo and my local supermarket definitely caters to those in small spaces. You can even find individually wrapped bananas or a two-slice bread set for the solo diner!
From an environmental point of view, the efficiency of packaging is low when you have small portions, but it may also encourage people to eat less, a problem here. Not so much in Japan though! People there are generally rather skinny.
Oh totally, I agree that the Japanese use too much packaging but the tapas-style of eating small portions over a long period of time in an izakaya def keeps most peeps slim!