When you are young and reluctant to eat what's in your plate, your parents always come back to you with some absurd rationals on why you should tuck in. They try to find in your plate some omens of your favourable future, just like Greeks were looking at the inners of a sacrificied animal for good auspices...
And the worst thing is that candid and credulous as a child can be, they tend to believe it all. Interestingly enough we even have a colloqual expression in French for "falling for a story": we say that someone "à gober l'histoire", literally "has swallowed the story".
The kind of lies or popular culinary legends argue that if you "Eat your soup and you will grow tall and strong", if you "Eat your spinach and you will be strong like Popeye"... And when it comes to carrots, well, there are two options:
- first for naughty children : "eat your carrots, they'll make you kind and polite"
- Alternatively, for organic and nutriceuticals friendly-parents: "eat your carrots, they'll make your bum skin soft and rosy"
Japanese loneliness.
These children stories came back to my mind when eating in a Japanese restaurant (to prepare myself for my upcoming trip to the country of the Rising Sun), I faced this bottle of still water. Now, I don't read ideograms, but I thought the imagery was quite explicit... It seemed that by hydrating myself I would improve the tonus of my bum. After all, we are made of more than 60% of water so that would make sense. And is the last ideogram just pointing at the areas where the benefits will be the most obvious???
As I said I am about to leave for a three-week journey in Japan, and I had a sudden flashback at Bill Murray in Lost in Translation when living this "experience". I will soon be the one hanging desperately around in Shibuya... Better go to my fridge and grab my last bunch of carrots to remain kind and polite during my whole stay.
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