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RE: Black Hole eats sun
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Ruphus)
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Secondary conditions like formal custom can be understood, and that the market is misusing Japanese priority on (fresh) groceries to entertain unique margins, is relatively well known since about the seventies of past century. Also that Japan ought to be meaning little of ground in relation to population. Still, to request / justify amounts between 20 and 80 bucks for a single water melone, even for a well-tended one, is beyond me. Indicating totally out of hand, bizarre circumstances. ... Almost like here, in Middle East, where I am a dirty foreigner too, who regularly torments bazaris for their price-gauging BS. - Whereas natives are traditionally docile and in respect of today´s diluting and disguising tricks have even forgotten how plain agrarian and sea products are originally supposed to be like. Honey combs off sawdust, fish sticks of undefined very strange material, sea fish poured over with chemicals (I suspect it to be chlorine) to cover stench of rotten stuff, paraffin in vegetable oils etc., ... after 40 years of market dictature won´t even be recognized as abnormal anymore. In pricing, together with places like Japan and some islands around the world, pioneers of the extreme, while for many people strange products and flavours are today´s standards, whereas merely intact / normal product has elevated to being luxurious delicacy. A friend of mine (an IT guy) together with wife and one of their daughters just returned from a tour through French Atlantic coast and Basque province. My first question: "How was it culinary?" was answered with them apart of some crepes and tapas having hardly sampled anything. It was too expensive. - From times before denaturalization, I remember yolk to have been yellow ever since. quote:
One can usually recognize organic eggs by the color of the yolk. A darker egg yolk is usually found in a conventionally produced egg. Since consumers perceive a darker yolk as a healthier, chickens from conventional farming get artificial dyes mixed into the feed. This is forbidden with the organic eggs, therefore the yolk is more bright with organic eggs. http://www.kochbar.de/cms/orange-oder-gelb-das-verraet-die-farbe-des-eigelbs-1651322.html According to the internet, this seems to be different in the USA, indeed.
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Date Aug. 26 2017 14:46:55
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Piwin
Posts: 3504
Joined: Feb. 9 2016

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to estebanana)
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Working in the fields harvesting canteloupe was one of the first paying jobs I ever had. Pretty hard on the back. The most expensive variety we worked with was some sort of hybrid that sold for 70 francs, which would be around 10 dollars I think. It tasted different than the other varieties. More juicy and very sweet, though to be honest I personally preferred the cheaper variety that tasted more, well, "melony" if that makes any sense. About this gift-giving business in Japan, I'm curious: are these expensive melons basically used only as gifts or do people buy them also for their own consumption? And if I were Japanese and I bought my girlfriend a melon for our X-year anniversary, would she be happy or would she bash my head open with it? Culture is weird. Most things can be explained away but often those explanations don't really cover the experiential significance of what's going on for the people involved. It's like explaining love by saying it's all about transmitting genes on to the next generation and rearing that next generation until they are big enough to fend for themselves. That may be true, but it doesn't really help explain what love means to us. It kind of misses the point. There's also plenty of explanations for music, evolutionary explanations, anthropological, biological and bunch of other -ical explanations, but none of them do justice to what music means to us as individuals on an experiential level. I'm sure there are also explanations on why people offer expensive melons to each other. Not sure those explanations would be of any help in understanding our fellow human beings who do this though. Look. I made paragraphs.
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Date Aug. 27 2017 20:04:44
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estebanana
Posts: 9197
Joined: Oct. 16 2009

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Ruphus)
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The giant expensive watermelons are tasty, very tasty. But you have to see it like buying a brand, some melons are Fords and some melons are Ferrari's. If a farm wants to get a name for a certain high level brand they spend a lot of time a money on the growing the finalists, and a lot of effort culling out of the melons that are not top tier. They may have developed a special farm particular strain that they have grown for decades. A farm may charge a high price because they won a prefectural argriculture contest. That the equivalent of winning your statewide fair for best hog. If I had a blue ribbon hog on my farm, I'd charge more. This is the difficult part to wrap your mind around, in Japan a vegetable or fruit, watermelon is a vegetable by the way, can be grown as a luxury item the same as a car. To a Western person that is odd because you think food is food. Like why would I pay for a $70.00 melon? But if you think about, it's not radically different from selecting an expensive restaurant to take a VIP out to for a meal that honors them. Right? You don't take an important guest to the local deli. When was the last time you gave someone a $9.00 bottle of wine when you were invited to a dress dinner party? You probably picked the $35.00 Rioja, unless you're a cheap twit. ( My wine rule is that if I put on my best black dress shoes to go out, bottom line $30.00 on a red, never a white, and never champagne- I hate champagne. I always say 'Sham pain for your real friends and real pain for your sham friends - then open a bottle of red.' ) Often when a person is in the hospital or in an assisted living compound the relatives will visit the mom, dad, aunt, uncle who lives there. In Japanese culture it would be a slight (or a massive insult in some cases) to that elder persons rank or honored place in the family if you came with a $5.00 gift...so you bring something kinda pricey, and for a person who is 95 years old, if the gift is perishable like food, they can give it away to the next round of visitors and they don't have to worry about keeping it on display in their room and taking up space until the next time the melon givers show up. The fancy watermelon can be a good birthday gift for grandma at the old folks home because she can invite her pals over to the table to have the premium water melon her wonderful caring children brought her. And the children can be assuaged of guilt, for a few moments at least, for having to have mom in an assisted living house. The expensive watermelon is multi-purpose, it serves a myriad of social ends. The idea that you give a gift to someone and they can in turn redistribute that gift to subsequent visitors is one of the things that drives the Japanese obsession with micro packaging. If the Western person gave you a box of crackers that were specially baked you would like oh big deal....crackers whoopee...However in Japan if you give a gift box of crackers the product may be from a famous cracker maker in Kyoto and very expensive, $50.00 for a special box of individually wrapped sembe, (rice cracker) making sembe is a art form and there are hundreds of kinds of delicious sembe from very tiny ones to sembe the diameter of a dinner plate. There is even one sembe that is shaped like a clay roofing tile and is exactly the same size as a real tile. If you pick up a box of sembe for $40.00, which is about 4600 yen, you may give it to someone. They might open the box and take out a few artfully wrapped crackers and put them into a very fancy paper bag and take them to give to the lady who runs the coffee shop they like to hang out at. That is the reason why things are individually wrapped. They can be regifted. So if you spend mucho bucks on a gift, the person you give it to might redistribute it. And that makes that persons life a bit more graceful because they have a small but elegant gift to give a person they know casually. It's courteous as a gift giver to select a gift that the receiver can also offer to others. It's called sharing. Of course this can all backfire at various stages, but that's another story.
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Date Aug. 28 2017 2:16:57
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Ruphus)
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Melons belong to family of pumkins. - Among dandy consideration there remains a striking pecuniary part poking into sober eye, though. quote:
Blame could also be laid upon ultra-expensive fruit pusher, Sembikiya, who, some might say cynically, created a market out of portraying fruit like it was a designer hand bag, and flogging it off to anyone rich enough and stupid enough to buy it. https://www.city-cost.com/blogs/City-Cost/zKvkM Expensive gifts are known all over the world. Only that most often they consist of actually backing value and usually of durability that won´t just sprout and rot away within days. I suppose no one will deny that not just expats, but Japanese natives just as well would whole-heartedly embrace daily consumption of fruits and vegetables at around near normal pricing, if protectionist policies and drastic import regulations would only allow fresh supply from say Australia. It´s being said that some foreigners quit living in Japan simply just for having been fed up with excessive price gauging and consequently lacking supply with fruits. It shouldn´t wonder if the same would account for some of Japanese migrants too. Experiencing almost as exaggerated market in Middle East (kg prices up to 30 bucks and more being common) in conjunction with bottlenecks of any refined food varieties, I can definitely understand motives to leave such places after a couple of years at the most. (Yes, one can take efforts like e.g. baking good bread oneself, but now in the summer heat with an oven that leaks half its temperature ... me stopped baking several months ago.) Lately having enjoyed several weeks with some sweet lemons (as prices had dropped to almost acceptable dimensions), just last week I allowed myself a small portion of pears of the kind that I prefer (green and firm, still sweet). The pleasure was without words and made me home sick once more. A true shame, for the (although meager appearing) local soil makes for outstandingly flavored agrarian products. -Very similar to conditions of fruits in Central America. (Me, for instance never appreciating grapes too much before, experienced outstanding flavors. -Giving me an idea of how wine making and beer brew was invented here.) I could grant myself samples like of those delicious pears a bit more often, but up from 8 bucks per kg for something that mother nature provides, just won´t pass rational structure of synapses. Sensing game of ordinary rip-off merchants, I feel an aversion against blackmail and feeding crude sponging.
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Date Aug. 28 2017 11:27:58
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010

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RE: Black Hole eats sun (in reply to Piwin)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Piwin quote:
Why? Must reasons to leave not count for Japanese themselves? That's not really what I was getting at. I just have a hard time believing anyone would leave a country just because they didn't have enough fruit... I can see someone adding that to a long list of post-hoc complaints as to why they left, but that's about it. But no, I can't imagine anyone filling it out their immigration form upon entry and writing "Reason for migration: not enough fruit"... I was going to make a joke and have the customs officer reply "sorry, but we already have enough fruitcakes here". Looked up the word because I wasn't exactly sure it meant what I thought it did. I thought it just meant a crazy person. Apparently it has a whole homophobic undertone to it. Good thing I looked it up It goes without saying that lacking supply of fruit will be one of several reasons. I can / must say however that this shortage is not as minor as it seems on first sight. You wouldn´t believe how it matters after several years. Ironically realized by me, who for the most of his life didn´t care about fruits. (Except of a few sorts like figs -those in the Balkans were best!-, mulberries, raspberries, mangos, old-fashioned / full flavored strawberries and occasionally said pears.) Now however, after years of shortage, I have learned to fully appreciate this kind of nature´s gifts. (Almost understanding meanwhile how folks of former Eastern Germany were lurked in by bananas.) These days, when TV-viewing full fruit baskets on people´s tables in the western world (or on those of local establishment), I tend to drool. And the second thought beeing like: "Jeez, if wanting to organize such a batch it would come in for several hundreds of bucks". A perverse situation of lust. Over here even just commercial juice is no juice anymore. Ingredienst have nothing of fruit anymore. Not even fruit syrup. Even what is there to emulate fruit flesh is being pectin. And that at around 8 bucks per liter. It´s about preparing market, excluding competition, closing borders for an inbreeding niche and then having green light for making insane money of literally nothing, squeezing off from the people. (In the same time, small farmers here are gagged.)
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Date Aug. 28 2017 14:55:50
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