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Japanese Snacks
Friday, September 30, 2005

Recently, we were honored and privileged to host a Japanese exchange student in our home for one month. She was a cute, fun, 12-year-old girl who had a maturity beyond her years and a great sense of humor. As is Japanese custom, she came to our home bearing an amazing assortment of gifts for our family, our extended family, and friends. We were stunned and thrilled to open package after package, looking in wonder upon all that she had brought to us. After opening nearly everything, she then presented us with a box full of Japanese snacks and delicacies. We Americans may think we have cornered the market on snack foods, but our Japanese exchange student introduced us to snacks, the likes of which we had never seen before.

Much of the Japanese diet is centered around rice, so most of the snack foods were rice based. While in our country we eat a lot of snack foods made of potatoes, corn, and wheat, we learned that the Japanese snack foods were lighter. Although we enjoy rice cakes in our country, rice can be made into many more varieties of snacks which are much more interesting.

One of our favorites was a type of candy or sweet. It consisted of a small ball of puffed rice, about the size of a piece of popcorn, dipped in caramel. Another wonderful sweet was a rice-based gel stick that tasted a bit like gummy bears. The colored and flavored gel was in a thin plastic tube and could be sucked out of one end. Similar to rice cakes in western areas, there were packaged rice cakes shaped more like candy bars. These rice cakes were wrapped in individual colorful foil packages and were a huge assortment of flavors from barbeque to chocolate to garlic. Since none of us could read the writing on the packages, and our student did not yet speak any English, we always had a surprise when we bit into one of the treats.

There were also more mature snacks to be served at dinner parties or other adult social gatherings. In addition to rice, the Japanese also eat a lot of dried fish. One of the delectable snacks our student brought was served in a beautiful tin box with a raised drawing on the top. Inside were individually wrapped, thin, round rice crackers. On each cracker was a thin slice of cheese and a paper thin slice of dried fish. The fish was so paper thin, in fact, that it looked like paper. When we first tried the snack, we began to peel off what we thought was the paper, but through hand gestures and a dictionary, our student explained about the fish.

There were a variety of other treats in the box brought to us from Japan; from mints and hard candies to rice pretzels and cocoa bars, we learned a lot about our Far-Eastern friends by sampling some of their snacks. We learned about many of our differences in preference and flavor, but most of all, we learned that everyone around the world, adult and child alike, appreciates great snack foods!

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