Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Apologies for the silence but I’ve been feeling ill. Feeling ill is a common thing when one day a week your job involves being in a room full of 5 year old Japanese children who are bouncing off the fricking walls with glee that you are there and can’t wait to grab your face with their disease-riddled hands, shiny with mucus and dotted with biscuit crumbs and spots of milk.

Today’s foray off a cliff and into the Bog Of Eternal Insanity involves a particularly niche genre of food with not too many examples: Food That Tastes of Plants. Not plants in the sense that “An orange tree” is a plant and therefore orange juice is plant-flavoured, you bunch of nit-picking pedantic bastards, I mean literally plant flavoured - in these food’s case, green vegetation and petals. Specifically, Aloe Vera flavour yoghurt and Cherry Blossom flavour chocolate.

Making food that tastes like plants is perhaps the last conceivable frontier that stands between us and manufacturers creating foods with flavours of things that don’t even make sense such as Stereo flavour potato waffles and Global Hypercolour cookies. But to the manufacturers I say, why resort to this so soon? Come to me. I have hundreds of ideas for food products so that you don’t have to clutch at straws and start making gravy out of tulips or something. To name just a few of my ideas: Shark On A Stick, Burger Burgers (the tagline would be “its a burger IN A BURGER” then you could have some fat kid looking surprised and saying “awesome!”), Deep Fried Watermelon, Educatin’ Bacon (with proverbs printed on them), and Liquid Meat (”all the goodness of a fine sirloin steak, in a drink!”).

Anyway, whilst these two products are siblings in type of ingredient they contain, the reasons for their existence are very different.

First off, Aloe Vera yoghurt. Aloe Vera is the same ingredient found in many brands of sun tan lotion and skin moisturiser, is now slowly being found to have health benefits when eaten too, probably discovered by way of some kind of comedy mix up of moisturiser and salad cream by the cackhanded but well-meaning medical intern making lunch for the eccentric but world-renowned professor that just got spat out of the Sitcom-o-matic machine in my brain.

I look forward to the day when humanity discovers that the cure for cancer or some new wonder drug is just some arbitrary thing that we have been using for some other purpose for hundreds of years, like maybe discovering that grinding blue M&Ms down into a paste and using it as a poultice makes your penis grow to twice its size, or that rubbing stinging nettles on your nipples during sex can make you orgasm harder.

This Aloe Vera “you can eat it too!” phenomenon is not limited to Japan, however. In the rest of the world, although currently the mainstay of health food and speciality stores and found only in the baskets of women who have given their children names like “Ariel” or “Peregrine” I am reliably informed that Aloe Vera yoghurt can be found in western lands, but is as yet mostly unknown to regular consumers. Get ready though, as with all bandwagon health food products that exploit the I WANT TO BE BEAUTIFUL AND MAKE IT TASTE OF SWEET breed of fad diet zealots, Aloe Vera in food products is priming itself to rape your world very soon.

Japan though, has been very quick to jump on said bandwagon and - with a market full of consumers who’s apprehensions about what they eat have been all but completely destroyed by the broad spectrum of disgusting food already being sold here - is one of the first countries to really embrace Aloe Vera as a food ingredient with many different yoghurt brands already putting it in their products and also a few drink brands jumping in the game too.

I see this as a good thing though. So, as humanity slowly destroys itself with our McKentuckyPizzaBurgers (shit that actually sounds DELICIOUS) and the cries of obese neighbourhood children whose mothers have hidden their butter-flavoured Optimus Prime dolls become ever more deafening I can sit on my sofa dreaming of beef milkshakes but eating a relatively low fat and ok-tasting snack that is not only healthy but will also prevent my inner stomach wall from being sunburnt.

The story behind cherry blossom chocolate makes much less sense. Although cherry blossoms are deeply woven into the culture of Japan nowhere does it say you should eat them, just as no one says you should storm the stage at a noh play and bite off an actor’s face, or habitually lick a shamisen. During cherry blossom season in Japan, people gather under cherry blossom trees and basically have a bit of a picnic, enjoying nature. Cherry blossom chocolate therefore, is the confectionary corporation’s tiny way of saying “we don’t make any profit from you people sitting around enjoying nature, so fricking give us your money”.

Appearance Cherry Blossom Chocolate - small wafers of chocolate with a predictable pink coloured layer. Individually wrapped, of course. 3/5

Aloe Vera Yoghurt - the clever thing about Aloe Vera is that no one knows what it actually looks like. Sure we have some vague image of a spiky looking plant but as far as the form of the flesh that we can eat goes, I’m sure the average joe won’t have a clue. Its like asking a priest “what does God look like” when you are 8 years old and have him reply “why, the smile of your mother is God” to which most 8 year olds would think “no it fricking isn’t”. The packaging is little help as it simply depicts the plant itself and gives no indication of how it will appear in edible form in the yoghurt.

Once opened and fished through for solid bits, the form of the Aloe Vera in this yoghurt becomes clearer - it is some kind of cubed jelly, probably only a microscopic amount of which actually contains Aloe Vera. 3/5

Taste/Smell Cherry Blossom Chocolate - the marriage of blossom and chocolate was always going to be a tough one to pull off without making people grimace like they just shit the bed and here the manufacturers have made something that was unfortunately fated from the start to be utter crap and nothing more than a cheap cultural cash-in.

The taste is unsurprisingly chocolatey with the added bonus of having a sharp aftertaste somewhere between pot pourri and that odd uncherry-like taste of Cherry Coke which everyone knows doesn’t taste a thing like cherry but we still fricking buy it and they keep selling it which is handy as “Same Stuff That They Put In Pot Pourri! Coke” wouldn’t fit on the can. So for all intents and purposes, it tastes a bit like eating perfume. Not good perfume however, perhaps perfume in the same way Working Class Brenda douses herself with Fabreze to kill the smell of cigarettes and baby vomit in preparation for meeting some inebriated stranger whom she will attempt to drag home from the pub that night and vigourously shag before having to stop because the combination of low grade heroin and Tenants Super coursing through her veins is making her dizzy. 2/5

Aloe Vera Yoghurt - I’m probably going to continue buying this product as the taste is surprisingly good and is yet another testament to the maxim that if you put enough sugar in anything it becomes edible. Whilst certainly no replacement for the stalwarts of yoghurt such as vanilla or strawberry, Aloe Vera makes a welcome change from such flavours with its odd, tart sweetness and for many like me the added novelty of pissing UV-proof urine will be just too enticing to withstand. 4/5

Fear Factor Cherry Blossom Chocolate - negligible apart from the nagging thought at the back of your head that says no, cherry blossoms aren’t food, are they. 1/5

Aloe Vera Yoghurt - negligible apart from the nagging thought at the back of your head that says no, Aloe Vera isn’t food, is it. 1/5

Health Implications Cherry Blossom Chocolate - its chocolate so, not great. Things are helped by the fact that each wafer-thin veneer of chocolate is so light as to not make any kind of serious impact on your diet unless you eat hundreds. That and the infuriating insistence on wrapping each thin slice individually ensures fat kids with fat hands will be slowed down at least a little. 2/5

Aloe Vera Yoghurt - beneficial, at least according to “scientists” and “the internet”. 4/5

Final Verdict Cherry Blossom Chocolate - 2/5 Aloe Vera Yoghurt - 4/5

This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2005 at 6:12 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.