An Engineer In Shenzhen

And it took me a while to figure out what it was, too.

Here’s the packaging:

And here’s what one of the little buggers looks like up close:

A little blurry, but it’s basically a brown nugget wrapped in a darker brown skin.

Putting one in my mouth resulted in a very salty and crunchy experience. Considering this is the experience associated with most snack foods, though, this is a huge step up from moldy and pitted. It took me a while to figure out that these are some sort of bean that has been left in its shell and baked (?). During the baking process the halves of the bean curl outward a little, which pops the ends of the shell off but leaves a band around the center. I imagine these would be fantastic to munch while drinking a beer. However, I realized with the saltiness that one of the dangers of doing this snack food experience is not just that I may be eating things meant to be cooked or served inside a dish, but also that I have no indication of serving size or healthiness of these foods. So while I may be popping these things in my mouth like peanuts, they may have a serving size of 2 beans.

Whatever. I’m still alive, and this is way less risky than many of the other things I’ve eaten so far here.

Who would have thought that dried fruit could be so difficult? Today’s twofer was born out of frustration. I was hungry and excited for something I was fairly confident would taste good. Dried fruit is always good, right? Even bananas seem to taste ok dried.

The first attempt was mangoes. I love mangoes. It even says it “Taste best !” at the top!

Mango. Looks safe.

But wait. Why is it brown? And why does it feel leathery?

And why oh why does it taste like it’s fermented, and have some sort of hard leather shell on it? It was HORRIBLE. It was like throwing a hand deep into a compost pile and eating whatever you pulled out. And they packaged and sold it! GAH!

Ok, so I had to put something else in my mouth to remove the awful taste. What about the plums? The package says “Cream flavored dried plum” and “Treasure flavour”, clearly putting in both spellings of flavor to appeal to all Western countries. Surely something in there would taste like cream, plum, or treasure.

Looks a little strange, but I’ll put it in my mouth anyway.

Come ON! Apparently in China “Creme flavored” means “extremely sour vinegar” and “Treasure flavour” means they leave the pit in as an extra gift inside every one. After sucking off the Sour Patch Kid level of flavor coating the fruit, and gnawing the morsel of plum off the pit, I was done. Defeated by inedible Chinese fruit snacks.

It has to get better than this. Maybe I’m using them wrong. Maybe they aren’t snacks at all but are meant to be used in some kind of larger dish? I can’t imagine them improving the flavor of anything they’re put in, so I’ll have to just conclude this horrible horrible aisle of packaged things is not intended for my demographic.

Next in the series of random packages of unidentifiable food…

No English, strange unidentifiable contents, we’re good to go. In case you are wondering about the date on the bottom, that’s the date of manufacture, NOT the expiration date. I know this because there’s some English on the back.

But the English on the back isn’t exactly very helpful when it comes to figuring out what I’m eating. The list of ingredients says thusly:

Very nice, but not exactly enlightening. Is it peaches or plums? I used google translate to help me out, and those first two characters in the chinese list of ingredients is “peach plum”. Ok, so maybe it was some kind of hybrid plant we don’t have an English name for.

Here’s what they look like as individuals:

They’re sort of like dried dates in color and texture.

Smell-wise, they’re nothing at all like dates. The smell of alcohol or fermentation was a little strong; enough that it was slightly disconcerting. And the taste was about the same. If you’ve ever had plum wine, you’ll recognize these immediately.

They don’t taste bad, and maybe in a different mood I might like them. But the slightly sour/vinegar taste made them less appealing as a snack than they should have been. Otherwise they were just a normal dried fruit. I didn’t finish them. I had a few and called it good.

Eating in China without knowing the language has been challenging. I’ve been fortunate enough to frequently be in the presence of people who could order for me so far during this trip, but I haven’t forayed out much on my own. That doesn’t mean I haven’t eaten adventurously. I’ve had frog, snail, chicken wing tip, chicken head, chicken neck (I’m pretty sure I haven’t eaten chicken breast oddly enough), jellyfish, pigeon, and other crazy foods I’d never have expected to eat, and I’ve only been here a couple weeks so far.

At the local supermarket is an entire aisle of strange snacks. Things I’ve never seen and often have no idea what they are. I’m making it a mission to try these snacks. The weirder and more unrecognizable the better. I figure they’re packaged and on a supermarket shelf, so the likelihood they will make me sick is low, and I only have to pull it off the shelf, not order it, so there isn’t anything holding me back.

The aisle of awesome.

In the first food experiment, I tried something that appeared to be lots of tiny little fish.

There appears to be no English at all on this package. Awesome!

This things look like tiny petrified fish covered in spicy grease.

So, what were they like? Well, they tasted like spicy fish jerky. They were very greasy on the outside, but the fish themselves were kinda tough like jerky. You eat them head and all because it’s so tiny, but it wasn’t really like you could tell any of the texture of the head or bones; it was all just a single-textured jerky morsel. The spicy really kicked in a few seconds after eating, though, and took me by surprise.

I wasn’t able to finish the whole package; they are edible but not something I’d actively seek out again. I tried putting them on my lunch noodles to spice them up a notch, but it didn’t really make either of them taste better.

Final verdict: meh.