Shawty, Shorted

I grew up with the Japanese snack brand Calbee. In coastal Asia, a plethora of snacks are seafood-related. One of my favorite Calbee products is their shrimp chips.

Actually, i have a hard time calling them chips. To me, chips are flat and round. These are strips, like French fries. I think i shall call 'em shrimp strips.

It was only a year or two ago when Elsie, a fellow Calbee enthusiast, turned me on to their wasabi-flavored shrimp strips. This version had been around for years; i just never imagined i'd care for it. Well, i did. And i started alternating for variety. (Alongside the other 23 "staples" i keep handy.)

This evening, finishing up the last of a 3.3 oz. (95 g) bag, i started reading the literature carefully - something i'd never done, which is odd, because as i have mentioned previously, I READ EVERYTHING.

First of all, in the frontal design, under the green word "wasabi" accompanied by a cute illustration of two shrimps sweating around a tubby of wasabi, the food mogul felt the need to add "Japanese horseradish". Really? Is there anybody left who hasn't heard of wasabi, or sushi, or ramen?

Am i naïve? Or overly optimistic? Or both?

On with the list of ingredients. Everything seems in order. Shrimp, check. Modified food starch, check. The quintessential monosodium glutamate, check. (I don't mind spelling out MSG. I kinda like the sound of it. [Whereas MSG sounds like it could easily be the secret police under some totalitarian regime.] Besides, i find it a fun fact that there's "glute" in both "glutamate" and "gluteus". *Giggle*)

Then comes the obligatory allergen information that one simply can't avoid these days:

Made in a facility that also manufactures products containing milk.

Really? That's it? Aren't you forgetting gluten, and, uh, SHRIMP?

Speaking of which, how sucky would it be to be gluten-allergic? I shudder to think.

Is it me or does it seem that, say, 40 years ago, there weren't so many different allergies? And not as many people, especially children, were afflicted?

Could it just be, back then, a lot went undiagnosed? That which you couldn't name you couldn't identify or tally.

To think that, as little as a century ago, infant mortality rate was way higher than today. (Don't make me do the research. You look up the figures!)

When i was little, i'd peer at our family albums, admiring a library of them, that my mother had been meticulously assembling, chronicling all the events with impeccable penmanship - a practice that was not common in her time. I'd ask about the cause of death of relatives who perished before my birth, who appeared too young to have died. The answer often would be, "Who knew back then?"

Or could it be, given the degree of food modification in the name of nutrition and health today, we may have rendered ourselves sicker, because now there are more forms of things to be allergic to that never existed before, our immune system kicking and screaming, "Stop feeding me things that are not food!"

I cannot be sure.

You may find this hard to believe now, knowing what we know, but my mother's generation believed (were led to believe) that formula was superior to breast milk. It was scientifically designed to perfectly deliver nutrients (not unlike what you hear in dog food commercials today). Wouldn't trust NATURE with that, would you? Moreover, formula cost a fortune. It was a symbol of status. The poor couldn't afford formula. The trick was to find the "right" brand that your baby's system wouldn't reject. Sometimes it took months.

Ever heard of an infant rejecting his or her mother's milk?