Comment by TheDong
14 hours ago
Indeed it's a roughly 2x increase (5kg supermarket bag from 2000 jpy to 4000).
Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
14 hours ago
Indeed it's a roughly 2x increase (5kg supermarket bag from 2000 jpy to 4000).
Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
> Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat.
Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.
Wait. Dod I read this right? Are you saying rice isn't real food but meat is?
I understand most cultures over-appreciate meat, but treating a premium carb source like rice lowly is a surprise.
I think Japanese rice-centric framing of meals is also of note, it's not universal across East Asia - I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China, but it's just a menu item in Japan.
> I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China
I can't personally attest to that, but it certainly makes sense. Rice meals vs noodle meals are a fairly fundamental split in Chinese cuisine.
(It doesn't make rice any less of a staple food.)
Corn is still cheaper. If you're really poor in Asia you're eating corn (and complaining about it).
Corn??? I don't think corn in bulk is cheaply available in Japan at all. There's a mention in Wikipedia of a Chinese-Mongolian corn meal porridge thing but it looks pretty local.
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If you go into a Chinese supermarket, it will quickly become apparent that the default cooking oil is corn oil.
I find this an interesting contrast with the United States, where the default cooking oil is Canola oil (if you're a person looking to cook your own food; this is the sense in which the Chinese default is corn oil) or soybean oil (if you're a company looking to sell packaged food in grocery stores). As far as I'm aware, traditional China would have had sesame oil and maybe soybean oil, and certainly not corn oil. The advantage of corn oil must be the price.
But if corn oil is so cheap, why does the cheapest oil available in the US seem to be soybean oil?
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>rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food
Um, rice is real food too, right?