3
Feb
Would You Like Coffee Milk, or コーヒー ミルク (Koohii Miruku)
Topic: Japan 2007
Update: After reading John’s comment I learned a little more about the milk here in Japan, and I decided to re-write the last couple paragraphs of this post.
I’ve found that the Japanese and the denizens of my home state, Rhode Island, share at least two things in common.
One is the tendency to drop the letter R from English words. Rhode Islanders aren’t quite as bad as Bostonians with their “pahk the cah in the yahd” style of speech, but they’re close. In Japan, when you see or hear English words that have been adopted into Japanese, the Rs are dropped whenever possible. For example, a Japanese sign for a “Visitors Center” will be transliterated into Katakana as ビジター センター “bi-ji-taa se-n-taa.” In some ways the Japanese accent is eerily familiar to me.
The other commonality is a passion for coffee milk - something I always thought was a peculiarity unique to Rhode Island (it’s the official state drink - see this article for more on this and other Rhode Island culinary oddities). I discovered tonight you can get coffee milk here in Tokyo too. We had dinner at the home of some new friends we made - Fred, who is from the US, his wife Hitomi, and their two kids. Hitomi made tacos for us, an exotic delicacy here in Tokyo (they get the ingredients from the Foreign Buyers Club). Their son Kaito goes to school with Kai (Kaito and his sister call our Kai “Toppa Kai” to avoid confusion over the similar first names). They had coffee milk with dinner, and I learned it’s a popular drink with kids here. Perhaps even more popular than in Rhode Island, given that you can get it here ready-made - in Rhode Island there’s just the Autocrat brand syrup (or maybe Eclipse too, but I haven’t seen that brand in years).
I haven’t had Rhode Island coffee milk since I was a kid, and I don’t remember the taste well enough to offer an opinion on which tastes better. Next time I’m in my home state, I’ll try some again, and let you know.
The milk here is not very good, which might have something to do with the coffee (and plenty of sugar) flavoring being popular. The low-fat is OK, but the higher fat milk that Eidan drinks smells bad even when it’s brand new. The milk industry is not regulated here to the extent it is in the US, and the results are not good. I found this rant written by an American teacher working in Japan that pretty much sums up the awfulness of Japanese milk. I’m not a milk drinker, but Fred is - he says he had to give up on the higher fat milk because he thought it smelled like chicken gone bad. To me, it smells bad but tastes ok, and - fortunately - Eidan doesn’t seem to mind it.
From what Maria can tell trying to decipher the Kanji on the cartons, the milk here is not homogenized. It seems to be pasteurized in some fashion, but I think not as well as in the US. You’ll come across cartons with all different kinds of fat percentages - they’re not standardized into just a few categories like the US.
Footnote: I came across this strangely interesting collection of Japanese milk carton pictures.
February 4th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Raw milk? That’s amazing. Raw milk is illegal to sell in many of these united states. Some people believe raw milk is a wonderful substance and promote its consumption. See realmilk.com
Others, such as Loren Cordain, belive that cow milk should be avoided at all costs. See “Hazards of Dairy” in his latest newsletter at thepaleodiet.com/newsletter/back_issues.shtml
Moooo!