Recently, Weird Asia News reported on the imminent invasion of Japan by legions of humongous jellyfish. The 6-foot-wide, 440-pound monsters known as echizen kurage threaten to devastate fisheries and even damage nuclear powerplants.

The pressure to find a practical use for these troublesome creatures has triggered the usual creative reaction from the Japanese. Unfortunately, “creative” and “appetizing” are not necessarily synonymous. Um, jellyfish caramels, anyone?

Jellyfish

That’s right: In what is surely a first for the confectionery world, students at Obama Fisheries High School have developed a type of caramel candy flavored with a powder made of jellyfish. The students harvested the critters themselves, as well as devising the process for producing the powder.

Word hasn’t reached us yet on the taste of these scary-sounding sweets, but it probably bears some similarity to that of the team’s previous product, the not-quite-an-international-sensation-just-yet Ekura-chan saku-saku cookies, also jellyfish based.

JellyfishCookies

Where to from here? The possibilities seem endless. It can’t be long before we’re introduced to the peanut butter and jellyfish sandwich, the jellyfish jellyroll, the jellyfish-flavored jellybean. And for God’s sake, someone get in touch with the folks who make Jell-O!

(link)

DanBing

DanBing

DanBing has lived in one Asian country and traveled in various others, engaging in activities that ranged from teaching English to playing Irish music to researching articles to marrying. The best part was usually the food, though the marriage hasn’t been too bad either. But of all his many accomplishments he is perhaps proudest of his close–extremely close–association with the person who wrote The Devil’s Food Dictionary: A Pioneering Culinary Reference Work Consisting Entirely of Lies (www.frogchartpress.com).