Pizza Flavoured Japanese English French Toast
Welcome to the 59th edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I hope that it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
If Patreon is not your thing but you enjoy what I'm doing, feel free to send me a little something via Paypal, and I'll re-invest it into the Japanese green tea that fuels much of my creative work.
This image has been making the rounds on Twitter, with people writing about cramming as many countries as possible into one product. Funny, huh?
When I first saw this, I almost believed it. After all, Japan does have a culture of relentless appropriation, and they have some pretty crazy food. But the picture looks Photoshopped, doesn't it? The flag at the top, the word "American", the three katakana characters in the red band at the bottom (that read doitsu - Japanese for "German"), the blue band... And the "Made in China" also doesn't look real. On the Japanese food packaging I've seen, the information where the food is made is always on the back.
I decided to run the image through Fotoforensics. This is what I got:
This shows the Photoshopped areas really well.
But I still was curious about the real product. Turns out that you don't actually have to Photoshop the real product because it already is pretty, well... spectacular:
Pizza flavoured English French Toast? What is that even?
After some minor internet sleuthing, I found an article about the company and its sandwiches. It's one of the funniest articles I've read in a while, even though I think most of the humour is unintentional:
how did an “English” sugar and margarine sandwich become a ubiquitous snack for a small, northern Japanese prefecture more famous for apples, summertime festivals and low life expectancy?
This simply is a story that I think you can only find in Japan:
entire generations of Aomori residents have grown up with English Toast. An informal poll of locals revealed that most people ate English Toast regularly during their school years, eventually outgrowing the sweet snack for less sugary foods. For many, it’s the taste of childhood. Some reminisced about eating it as an after-school snack, while others admitted that they still eat it a few times a year out of nostalgia.
My favourite part of the story is this part:
Coming up with different flavors for each month is a surprisingly involved process. Every week, a tasting committee of 20 employees meets to test around 10 new flavors of English Toast (among other products) for the upcoming months. [...] Once the members have narrowed down a few potential flavors of English Toast, they go to a second tasting committee, which meets every two weeks. During these meetings, the CEO and chairman have the final say [...] Attendance is mandatory, and lockdown didn’t put these meetings on hold. Up to 100 product samples were regularly delivered to employees at their homes, and weekly tasting sessions continued as scheduled over Zoom. Few employees look forward to these tasting sessions. “You have to eat even when you don’t want to,” explains Nasu as Kakizaki voices her agreement. “It’s tough.” They’ve tasted so many experimental varieties over the years that nothing stands out in their memories as especially awful: Even the revolting flavors have simply blurred into an amorphous pile of rejects.
If this has you curious about Kudopan products, you can find the sandwiches here.
How do I get from pizza flavoured English French Toast to something more serious?
I have no idea.
I think I'm going to pour myself a glass of water first.
You might have heard of Maggie Nelson. I read her book The Art of Cruelty while working on my last manuscript (that I'm still shopping around -- can't claim it's a book quite yet). The other day, I came across an interview with her whose headline had me immediately interested: On working with and against constraints.
That is the essence of the creative life, isn't it? Working with but mostly against constraints.
Turns out the constraints part is actually a lot less interesting than some of the other stuff:
one of my good friends and mentors gave me the best advice I’ve ever gotten about this. He said, “Remember, your feelings about the work don’t determine the value of the work.” You can feel frustrated, disgusted, agitated, hopeless, every day, on and off, but you can’t necessarily believe all your moods. You just have to keep on working.
Yeah, not believing in your moods. That’s a quote from Emerson, I might add. “Our moods do not believe in each other.” Which is one of my favorite quotes because when you feel despair, despair doesn’t believe in joy. And that can be very hard as a writer. If you feel like you open up your files and everything looks like shit and you’re upset, that mood is going to make you want to invalidate your whole project. You just have to get kind of Buddhist about it and recognize all that is weather.
I'm thinking that these few sentences get to the core what so many creative people are struggling with. You write a new piece, or you take some pictures. The next day, you look at what you made AND IT'S ALL SHIT. This throws you into the pit of despair you're so familiar with that you notice yourself muttering "hello, old friend".
(If you happen to be one of the few people who have never had to deal with this, all I can say: good for you. The rest of us -- that's what we deal with all the time.)
And there's only one way out: you soldier on. You could use the Buddhist mindset Nelson mentions and treat it as weather; or you could just keep working, knowing that with a lot of work you will get to your goal (however much time it might take).
More wisdom from Maggie Nelson:
Failure is also subjective. There occasionally can be works of art where everyone agrees it’s terrible and worthless. But I learned a lot in working on The Art of Cruelty and talking to people at events and emailing with people. I really did learn that people have different needs and preferences about what they’re going to art for.
This is what I've been trying to put front and center every time I encounter a piece of art I don't like (or get). It might be bad, or it might simply not something I am looking for. The latter doesn't invalidate its being or value. I often feel that this idea isn't quite appreciated enough in the world of photography.
Trying to adopt this mindset has made me less judgmental -- but not less critical.
And it also helps when making one's own art: you have to make it for yourself first. If it later finds an audience, that's the bonus.
Lastly: this morning, I got distracted when I made myself my habitual cup of green tea. I let it steep too long (exactly twice as long as recommended). Everything had been set up perfectly (the amount of tea, the water temperature), and then I got distracted.
But it turned out that the tea still was perfectly fine. It maybe was a little bit too rich. Maybe.
A couple of weeks ago, I started writing a "tea diary". It's little more than a writing exercise: one of the first things I do every day (after taking care of the cats) is to make green tea.
The "diary" is an exercise to use the opportunity to start the day writing. The tea merely is the frame work. I write about it and anything else that's connected to that morning, even if it's just a woodpecker peeking into the kitchen.
The exercise has been oddly satisfying so far. The writing has no goal other than itself. I've never written without a clear purpose before. Usually, I have an idea and I write; or there is some assignment to be fulfilled.
Thank you for reading! Until next time!
-- Jörg