Food that never goes bad

In the early part of the Edo period (1600-1800), the Hamamoto family, who began the now famous chain of restaurants called "Hamamotos" realized that they could not attract enough customers to dine in their restaurants merely by posting the menu on the door in front. Words alone would not entice diners or stoke their cravings enough for them to tie up their donkeys, put down their barrels of pickled radishes, and come in for a meal. So, they decided to put samples of what they were serving outside in a glass case. Each day, Mrs. Hamamoto would cook one of everything that was on the menu and place it in the case for passers by to see. Within minutes of doing this, Hamamotos was filled with people slurping their noodles, gnawing on their eel jerky, and swishing down the red bean pudding. There was just one problem. The flies. They too liked Mrs. Hamamotos cooking. So, poor Mrs. Hamamoto had to remake the dishes every two hours. As the restaurant was open for lunch and dinner, this was quite a task. For over three hundred years they had to make nearly twenty meals per day to place in the case.

And then came plastic. In 1952, plastic came to Itsamuyama, where the original Hamamotos stood. Hiroku Hamamoto, the black sheep of the family who wanted to be a chemical engineer and not run the restaurant, decided to see if he could use plastic to make something that looked like food. He took some plastic and some food coloring and his father's noodle maker into the wooden storage hut behind the restaurant and went to work. Lo and behold... he made pasta that looked just like real pasta, but was plastic. It glistened with "sauce", yet it would not go bad.

OK. I just made that up. I have no idea why there is so much plastic food in Japan, but it is insane. Everywhere you go, there are the most realistic plastic replicas of the food. Most of the replicas are great, but some are pretty Junior Varsity... like the restaurant went all out and bought the most expensive barbecued eel, but saved and went for the cheapo green tea cake. I do kind of envision dueling plastic food manufacturing families like the Montagues and the Capulets in Romeo and Juliet. Their children fall in love and kill themselves by eating plastic sushi.

This is a blog/piece on plastic food, if you are interested...Below are some photos of some of the plastic food I've seen. The motherlode is at the Kyoto train station... where they have like 50 cakes that look unbelievably real and are very detailed. So... enjoy the show.

http://www.japanwelcomesyou.com/cssweb/display.cfm?sid=1245