Curry Toothpaste and Oyster Ice-cream

If you thought corn, potatoes and mayonnaise on pizza was a little too strange to stomach, read no further!



In the West the line between sweet and savoury is a clearly delineated one. Dessert is one thing; eel, eggplant and raw horse meat is most certainly another. But in the East, this age-old sweet/savoury divide is regularly flaunted, and often with the most ghastly of results.

This cultural gap was never more apparent than when I took some students of mine to a Ben and Jerry's in Seoul for some Chunky Monkey, New York Fudge Brownie and Cookie Dough ice-cream (if you're unlucky enough to live in a country without one, Ben and Jerry's is surely up there with the best ice-cream in the world). One of the students pulled out a pack of prawn-crackers, and with squeals of delight, all the students began scooping up the ice-cream with their crackers! I'd never felt so far from home...

But prawn-crackers and Chunky Monkey is only the beginning, and it is surely in Japan that this blurring of divisions has been taken to its most alarming extremes.

Mint. Spearmint. Peppermint. Until now, the range of toothpaste flavours has been monotonously minty. But this minty monopoly is finally over. How about spicing up your brushing with some Indian Curry Toothpaste? Or sweetening your breath with the White Peach? Japanese brand Margaret Josephin has released a range of 31 alternative toothpaste flavours, one for each day of the month:

Sweet Salt, Tropical Pineapple, Peppermint, Fresh Yogurt, First Crop Green Tea, Rose, Monkey Banana, Honey, Kiwifruit, Cafe au Lait, Plum, Tsugaru Apple, Vanilla, Indian Curry, Strawberry, California Orange, Kyoto Green Tea, White Peach, Kisshu Ume, Lavender, Darjeeling Tea, Cinnamon, Budou (grape), Lemon Tea, Bitter Chocolate, Blueberry, Caramel, Espresso, Grapefruit, Pumpkin Pudding, Cola*



Cakes are another of these fusion food hot spots. Last night I watched a show on TV all about "Fushigi-na Keki" - Strange Cakes. Featured cakes included Abalone Cake, Eel Cake and Natto Cake (natto is rotten soy beans, and must surely beat durian for the title of worst-smelling-food-in-the-world), and none of them were savoury (I believe the Eel Cake was chocolate!)

But the king of weird food must certainly be Japanese ice-cream. Brace yourself for what is surely the vilest ice-cream ever made: "Raw Horse-Flesh Ice-Cream".



There's also Goat (and no, that's not just the milk!), Wasabi, Cactus, Octopus, Prawn, Oyster, Eggplant and Whale Meat flavours, to name a few. If you've got a strong stomach, you can check out all the awful flavours by clicking here.

In all fairness, many of these things are almost as repulsive to an average Japanese person as they are to me. But then again, there's must be a market for these sins against sweetness here somewhere.

*I don't think these toothpastes are available outside of Japan, but if you just have to try the Bitter Chocolate or the First Crop Green Tea, let me know and I can try to ship some out to you (210 yen each).