Ethnic

I was looking for tinned bamboo shoots in the supermarket today - I need them to make a Burmese chilli bamboo and tomato dish from the most excellent cookbook Hsa-ba that a friend gave me (well, gave my Smaller Half, but I have annexed it for my own use, muahahahah!).

So I went looking for bamboo shoots in the "canned vegetables" aisle. No luck. Aaah, I thinks, they hides the precious bamboo shootses in the "Asian Foods" section! And sure enough, there they were, along with all the other food from the far off lands of Asia.

Does anyone else think that the Asian Foods section concept is ridiculously anachronistic? Rice is Asian, but it's not there. Soy sauce is Asian, but it's not there. There are plenty of Asian vegetables that live together with occidental vegetables in perfect harmony. They'd be better off calling it the "Stuff White People Don't Know How To Use" section. Or perhaps more accurately, the "You Don't Find This At The RSL Club" section.

Considering how diverse Asian food is, lumping it all together seems perverse. Perhaps the true purpose of it is to quarantine the weird stuff away from the prying eyes of casual shoppers so they don't give themselves fits when they realize they can't read some of the writing on the label.

While I was pondering all this, and also marvelling at the fact that they did actually have bamboo shoots, I noticed that there is one other "ethnic" food section in my local supermarket. I'd run a poll on getting you to guess what it was but I'm in full flight so I'll do it rhetorically.

Was it Mexican? No.

Was it Lebanese? No.

Was it Italian? No.

Was it Somali? As if.

Was it Dutch? Oh yes, my friend, the two powerhouses of world cuisine are, apparently, Asian and Dutch. Just imagine how delicious food from the Dutch East Indies must be!

So what's in the Dutch Food section? Apparently Dutch people mostly eat:

• gingerbread,
• almond biscuits,
• apple sauce, and
  
• something called fritessaus that could be either like mayonnaise or tomato sauce or maybe mustard or maybe all three or perhaps even a subset thereof, but to judge from the name is squeezed onto chips.
  

To steal a quote from Yoda, "How you get so big, eating food of this kind?"

I can see why you'd need to have a separate section of the aisle specifically for such delights though. I mean, if you put the gingerbread and almond biscuits in with the other types of biscuits, God knows what might happen!