Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Since Chinese New Year is now upon us and since I am half Chinese (left side) today’s review has a Chinese flavour.

Apart from most European eastern-bloc countries where all food is made out of pulped newspaper, the People’s Republic of China has a reputation (in my stereotype-laden mind) for having a slightly cavalier attitude to both what it puts in its food products and to what it says it has put in its food products. I’d guess the situation is much worse in more secretive and poverty-stricken countries as North Korea, where I like to think of whole communities subsisting entirely on eating rocks, told all the time that they are in fact eating succulent cuts of sirloin steak, by some local official dressed in a green vintage 1970s Nike t-shirt they found in the cargo of an International Red Cross charter plane that they shot out of the sky, whilst shouting through a traffic cone and whipping them with a chain made of dead rats.

Late last year I took a trip to Hong Kong and the proximity to Mainland China meant that - way more than usual - anything that was either cheap or crap or dangerous to use around children who still have limbs was at that very moment being manufactured in the hundreds of thousands just over the border in Shenzhen, by random companies that all have names like “Golden Trading” or “Lucky Products” and whose CEO wears a tie that reads “I (heart) Economies Of Scale!” and who loves nothing more than to bathe in a huge tub of thousands of the tiny vacuum-moulded yellow plastic dolphins-with-guns that the company has been sub-contracted to manufacture that week.

These Ginger Candies are one of those items. Packaged in a bag styled with all the finesse of someone who has hurriedly thrown together a design in Microsoft Paint on a laptop computer whilst simultaneously running and dodging giant video game steam presses that come crashing down from the sky, with a mere glance at this product you can see that it is meant for either:

a) inquisitive young tourists who’ll buy anything that looks “quaint”, or b) Chinese peasants who pop one of these in their mouths before scraping the crispy vomit induced by the “Uncle Ho’s Deep Fried Insectery” discount buffet off their beds and falling asleep only to have to wake up 2 hours later to start the morning shift at the Louis Vuitton factory.

But hey, I’m not the kind of person who’ll let a bad design get in the way of a possibly delicious and exciting new taste experience. However, there is a cultural feature concerning the entrepreneurial Chinese which sets an ugly precedent for how tasty things like this are going to be, and that is the fact that the Chinese appear to have discovered that adding A LOT of sugar to anything turns it into candy.

I imagine the R&D department at Chinese confectionary firms to be a lot like the old infinite monkeys / typewriters paradigm except instead of typewriters they have a huge sack of sugar and an infinite amount of random objects strewn about the floor, like oompa loompa dolls and car exhausts, and given an infinite amount of time the staff occasionally stumble upon a combination of sugar and one of these items, and find that it doesn’t induce death as quickly as the others. These products are ones such as these ginger candies (the ingredients - as written on the packet verbatim - are ginger, sugar and starch), the very popular White Rabbit Candies (milk, sugar, starch) and the ubiquitous Haw Flakes (hawthorn, sugar, starch).

The manufacturers have chosen to describe their product in this way, on the back of the packet:

“Sunan Ginger Candy is a nourishing, healthy sweet, suitable for the whole family at any time”

I take issue with this statement as whilst this sweet may be healthy, I found its abhorrent taste highly unsuitable for any time other than when I am unconscious or when I can’t find a fork to stab myself in the penis with during my daily 5 Minutes Of Pain.

Appearance The first thing that struck me about Ginger Candy is how much it resembled opium, which is strange considering I have lived a fairly sheltered middle-class upbringing and have never seen opium in my entire life. Ginger Candy’s earthly form is that of deep brown rectangles of jelly-like resin. Each comes wrapped in a layer of edible (at least I fricking HOPE so) rice paper, and an outer layer with a motif of a ginger plant and some Chinese that probably reads “Many have tried, tried and died”. Also on the outer wrapping is a bit of English that reads “With You Every Day”, presumably trying to imply the kind of companionship sentiment that perhaps a more charming sweet such as a Werthers Original could muster up, but all this ginger candy manages to achieve by stating this on the wrapping is instilling the fear that it will follow you from the shadows and stab you in the face when you least expect it. 2/5

Taste/Smell A pleasant warm, sweetness can be experienced for a few seconds until the sugar dissolves and unleashes the fury within. I’m not quite sure just how much ginger is in each candy, except that it is too much. Far, far too much. It is hard to describe the taste of something which you only have the courage to eat in miniscule bites at a time, but the taste after the first few sugary seconds is something like thousands of tiny little droplets of acid hitting the back of your throat and dissolving your oesophagus from the inside out. If that is even a taste. Ginger is not merely the “flavour” here. No. In this candy’s case, ginger was the form that was chosen for Sunan Foods to unleash pure evil onto this world in. The taste is unforgiving, extremely strong, and you’ll probably be shitting steam for a week. I tip my cap at the man who can eat one of these whole and not cry for his mother whilst flailing his arms around and screaming like a howler monkey on fire. In addition to this each bite of ginger candy is accompanied with a significant amount of annoying gritty bits, which I can only assume are actual particles of grit. 0/5

Fear Factor None at first. Its candy! But then you put one in your mouth. 4/5

Health Implications I’m going to assume that since ginger is a feature here, these will have a beneficial impact on health unless you eat too many and cause massive internal haemorrhaging. 4/5

Final Rating: 2/5. I think I’ll stick with smegma flavoured Japanese chips, for now.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 14th, 2005 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Food Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.