As I’m preparing for meeting dozens if not hundreds of new people in the coming months, I’d been doing some thinking and research into what non-perishable food items I can bring with me to share with my (hopefully) new friends.
In the US, you might consider doing something like this if you live in or visit an area with very well-known specialties, but it’s not expected that you will bring anything with you.
When Americans travel abroad, they buy souvenirs – a word based in the French verb “to remember” – something for themselves to help them remember the trip they went on. Perhaps they also buy gifts for friends and family, but I don’t believe most people feel compelled to do so. Souvenirs are everything from trinkets to clothing, but most important to this discussion is the fact that they generally are not food. After all, it’s hard to remember your trip months down the line by the cookies you ate 5 days after you arrived home.
Some people may disagree, but in my opinion food items purchased while abroad, whether for yourself or others, are merely gifts and not souvenirs. There’s no specific word for it.
On the other hand, when one travels within or outside of Japan and returns home, one is socially obligated to bring back omiyage (お土産) for family, friends, and colleagues. I don’t have statistics for this quick blog post, but if I had to guess I’d say 80-90% of all omiyage is food. Any trip to an airport, major train station, or even grocery store in Japan will bring this point home neatly.
Part of this is just pure practicality – if you’re obligated to give every time you travel, then everyone around you is obligated to receive and presumably store whatever you give them. Unless of course it’s consumables! Then all you have to take care of is the mountains of packaging surrounding it.
I personally feel like this lightens the pressure of picking the food gift as well – if they hate it, at least they won’t feel like they need to hold onto it lest you show up at their house one day in hopes of seeing that beautiful cat statue displayed in their living room.
It was a bit difficult for me to pick out items that I felt were unique because, having lived in America for basically all but four months of my life, none of it felt very special. So I went online and searched (in Japanese) to see what people were bringing back, or at the very least, what websites suggested people bring back.
In the end I went the snack and candy route, as that’s the easiest to divide up (individual packaging), least likely to get damaged in transit, and most importantly won’t spoil quickly.
Here’s what I bought:
- Cheez It snack packs in three flavors
- Snyders 100 calorie pretzel packs (3 different types!)
- Goldfish in classic cheddar flavor
- Milk Chocolate Flipz in Halloween themed snack packs
- Ghiradelli assorted minis
- Ghiradelli pumpkin spice caramel
- Ritz peanut butter sandwich snack packs
- Skittles
- Smarties
- Lindt assorted mix
- Starbursts
- Reese’s/Hershey’s Halloween mix
- Sour Patch Kids
- Candy Corn
- Butterfingers
This is a bunch of aggressively bright colored packaging with all the prominent American flavors:
- Sweet
- Salty
- Sour
- Peanut Butter
- Cheese
I’ve got fruity, chocolate, peanut butter, cheese and just plain sugar. Doesn’t get more American than that, at least when it comes to non-perishable snack food.
The final touch will be to package all these up into adorable little gift bags, hopefully in red/white/blue coloring for that extra ~American~ flare. I may still pick up a couple extra nice items for my new bosses, but these will be great for meetups and especially the start of my internship.
Now I just need to figure out how to fit all of this in my suitcase…