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June 12, 2000

SIZE DOES MATTER -- IN FOOD!

Americans think big.

Whether it's ideas or products, news or entertainment, everything has to be BIGGER or a BLOCKBUSTER. I'm sure it has something to with the size of the country and the wide-open spaces of its land from sea to shining sea.

The Big Mac, super-sized meals, jumbo french fries, giant roast beef and foot-long hot dogs are staples of American fast-food culture.

The Japanese, in comparison, live in a tiny country and much of its population is concentrated in very close quarters in urban areas such as Tokyo and Osaka, where homes and apartments are often incredibly cramped. This is not to say that Japanese think small -- but certainly, there has been a prevailing mentality that smaller is better in recent Japanese history.

Space considerations account for the dominance of what we in the United States call compact cars. Even when space isn't important, though, Japanese have designed diminutively: The transistor in the 1950s led to the boom in tiny, handheld transistor radios in the 1960s, and the trend continues today with Japanese innovation in technology including tiny, handheld wireless telephones.

Even products such as food and drinks can emphasize this concern with keeping things small.

The Big Mac, super-sized meals, jumbo French fries, giant roast beef and foot-long hot dogs are staples of American fast-food culture, and the "Big Gulp" is a popular item at 7-Eleven convenience stores. I see people everywhere holding gigantic, 64-ounce plastic containers of soda pop for conspicuous consumption which look more like buckets than cups. I can't understand how one person can even drink that much liquid in one sitting. I know one Japanese American woman who always drinks Big Gulps, and the sight looks comical, like Alice in Wonderland struggling with an oversized teacup.

Big Gulps may exist in Japan, but I didn't notice them when I visited a few years ago, and I find it hard to believe that they would be popular there. A more typical size for a soft drink in Japan is slightly more than 8 ounces in a demure, slender aluminum can, instead of the American equivalent, 12-ounce cans.

It's almost as if Americans want more than they need just because they're used to having too much. I recently had a can of "Fruitique," a plum-flavored soft drink made by UCC (I love to try any strange canned drink or snack food I can find in Pacific, the local Japanese supermarket). It's a satisfying serving at 8.81 ounces, and I felt no need to have more even though it tasted fine.

To be fair, though, Japanese do indulge in excess from time to time. All-you-can eat "Viking-style" restaurants are popular in Japan and I found them refreshingly American in concept. As far as I can tell, the term "Viking-style" is used to describe these all-you-can eat establishments, which are usually help-yourself buffets, because it was too inconvenient to pronounce the Swedish term "smorgasbord," which means a buffet meal serving a variety of food. The leap from Scandinavian to viking-style makes sense to me.

I've also enjoyed nice meals out at traditional Japanese restaurants, where you sit in tatami rooms and are served course after course of food. Several years ago, I was lucky enough to enjoy one such meal in Fukui, a city on the western side of Japan, which was a celebration of local seafood delights.

The restaurant was a tiny sushi bar on downtown Fukui's main drag, and upon entering, didn't betray any of the riches we would be served. A couple of men sat at the cramped sushi bar on the first floor, but we were led upstairs to what I thought would be a sit-down restaurant. Instead, we were seated in a small private room at the end of a narrow hall, and served sashimi, fried fish, tempura, strange side dishes and pickled things, lots of squid in various forms, chawan-mushi (a Japanese egg custard dish I hadn't had in years), and finally, ochazuke (rice topped with tea). Wow -- I thought I'd die.

Going out isn't the only place to get your fill, either. Family dinners at home can be as enormous as in any other culture.

During another trip to Japan, I was invited to have dinner with a family and some friends, and they stocked up on very thin slices of Kobe beef and many different types of vegetables, and we all sat around a large shallow electric skillet and cooked our own ingredients to taste all evening in a very communal -- and very filling -- meal.

And that goes for Japanese American families as well as Japanese. I just had an enormous meal to celebrate my friend Jared's 15th birthday, and the servings were huge an the cuisine ran the gamut from all-American steak on the barbecue grill to chow mein, gyoza dumplings and seaweed-wrapped onigiri rice balls with pickled plum in the center. That was just the main course -- we also had mountains of tsukemono (pickled side dishes), brown rice, corn on the cob (another American element, but "Japanesed" up with soy sauce drizzled on it on the grill), fruits and berries and of course, cake and ice cream.

The feast was truly wonderful, but so was the culture at dinner. Some of the people there spoke Japanese, some English, and a few both languages, so the banter was multi-lingual as well as multi-cultural. And the entire evening's effect was one of huge size -- huge in both portions served and eaten, and in the scope of the party itself.

And today, I'm getting huge (as opposed to tall). Such is the inevitable results of thinking big with food -- even without drinking Big Gulps.