Wマロンのクリームホーン

Faux seasonality - it's one of the enduring myths of Japanese cuisine. All too often one is reminded of the Japanese obsession with its 4 seasons and its concern for preparing and serving food at its perfect time. Just like most other nations on earth. There's nothing special here. Especially when it's mixed up and mediated by the forces of industrial food. Japanese food in reality isn't particularly seasonal. You can get bad apples here all year, whether they're in season in Yamagata, imported from China or Australia. Sanma, which once truly was a fall fish, is now on grocery store shelves all year. Of course, they do lots of promotions for it in the autumn, but who's to know when that fish was caught - and frozen. Coulda been any time.

So, here's a little something from Fujipan, a particularly awful corporate baking concern, that hit the market about a month or so ago - Wマロンのクリームホーン. That's your W (meaning double) cream marron (chestnut) horn - a particularly nasty vienniose-style pastry. God know what they did to create this simulacra of pastry. In the double-ended "horn," one side had some sort of sham "whipped cream." The other a brown-died version of the same "whipped cream" that had the vaguest hint of sour chestnuts. Not at all a pleasant thing to eat.

But, in addition to the just plain badness of it, there was the package and the timing that made the whole thing even worse. Here it is, early September - this year mercifully temperate, but still not really fall. The package in an array of fall colors - oranges, yellows, browns - with bursting chestnut pods and bright maple leaves carrying all the appropriate signifiers. So when did they harvest these chestnuts? Not this year. When was the pastry made? Probably not this year either. At least it didn't taste like it.

This and other products of its ilk suddenly appear on convenience store shelves, pretending to be seasonal products. Bullshit. They merely take advantage of peoples' senses of nostalgia - if even that. Perhaps they become more insidious - blind markers of what you're supposed to be consuming and when.  Eating up every season like clockwork, marking off the years until you die.