Expensive Food (2004-04-06)
Few people can dispute the fact that Tokyo has some of the most
expensive food on the market. When I was traveling through Japan
years ago, I saw a very special kind of beef selling for US$600 a kilo
and a musk melon $500. The economy must be booming
then.
I haven't seen such outrageous pricing of late. But I've still
noticed some very expensive food especially fruit that is packaged for
gift-giving, and come Fall the
first batch of Japanese matsutake, a kind of wild mushroom, will hit
the market at roughly $30-$50 EACH mushroom.
Out of the ordinary foodstuffs in a grocery store, rice and chicken
wings are strangely expensive. A 5-kg bag of rice is about US$23,
I've yet to see steeper pricing than that in other parts of the
world. A pack of 8 chicken wings' drumsticks costs nearly
$4 and the middle sections of wings (wingettes) sell for
just slightly less. And why do they always split wings into
drumsticks and wingettes and sell
them separately here? There must be a whole bunch of people out
there who only like half of a wing and dislike the other half. Or
may be it's a ploy to keep shoppers from realizing that a chicken wing
really costs a frigging dollar each.
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