Sometimes I scroll through reels on social media, just drifting.
Usually at the end of the day, in bed.
After watching for a while, it dawns on me — oh, I’m tired, I don’t want to think about anything anymore.
These past few days I’ve been pretty worn out, so I was doing that a lot.
For a while it was a lot of videos of people making pizza and focaccia from scratch. Because I get absorbed in those, more and more cooking videos come up.
Lately, videos of Japanese people living in Japan, cooking, keep showing up.
Yesterday, one of the videos I watched caught my attention.
Newly built, maybe. A really lovely home.
The stairs, the way the rooms are made — beautiful.
The mother, in her forties perhaps.
She’s making breakfast.
She takes store-bought bread from a big brand out of its bag, lays the slices out, spreads mayonnaise, adds something like bacon, and toasts it all in the oven.
“Breakfast’s ready,” she calls to her children.
A happy-looking scene.
Because I watched the whole thing, another of her videos played automatically.
She was making dinner.
She defrosts frozen meat in the microwave, and cooks it in a Teflon pan on an IH cooktop.
True enough — this is the everyday cooking of an ordinary Japanese housewife, nothing unusual.
Pancake mix. Instant jjigae base. Okonomiyaki flour. All sorts of things lined up at the supermarket, convenient-looking, instant-like. The instant foods, too, arranged so neatly.
Curious now, I looked up her videos — lots of likes, every one with views in the tens of thousands, the big ones hitting a million or so.
First of all, store-bought bread in Japan — except from the few places that are really careful — is made with shortening and margarine. Once you get to the big brands, all kinds of things you can’t quite identify are in there. And yes, it does taste good.
That something-like-bacon — in Japan it’s probably sold labeled as “bacon.” But Japanese bacon is a completely different thing, and it too is packed with a frightening amount of additives. Said to be carcinogenic.
The microwave, apparently, was originally military technology, and it’s said to alter the very molecules of food.
Teflon pans are still the main thing sold in Japan, but they carry something called PFAS, said to be carcinogenic.
IH cooktops give off strong electromagnetic waves, apparently, and these too are said to be carcinogenic.
All those convenient-looking cooking “bases” and mixes, lined up so neatly.
This may just be Japan’s ordinary way of eating.
Most of the people who watch this video and hit “like,” I think, don’t notice how strange it is.