#1153 Soy Run

One of my many curses or blessings is that I’m an inveterate reader. Give me a package with an ingredients list, post a reader board sign alongside the road, you got me for at least a few seconds.
So it was that the other day I was reading an ingredients list on a tin of teriyaki oysters and had an astonishing revelation. The box for the oysters I was about to eat said they were Pacific Pearl oysters and, coming as I do from oyster land, I was curious if the pearls were from my part of the Pacific.
The other statement printed on the box, “Made in China” raised my doubts. As oysters grow in the bottom of bays and are sort of filter feeders, legendary Chinese environmental pollution sub-standards loomed in my brain.
But my discovery was of a different pearl of wisdom altogether. The teriyaki oysters were soaked in teriyaki sauce, which the ingredients list said contained soy sauce which they further broke down into saying contained soy and wheat.
I thought, soy sauce contains wheat? And then ran to my cupboard, grabbed the big Kikkoman bottle, and proceeded to confirm that the first ingredient in soy sauce after water is indeed wheat.
And frankly, it shook up my worldview. Somehow “amber waves of grain” in China or Japan just doesn’t conform to my image of the lands of soybean curds and tofu.
And really, I don’t call my calcium-laced orange juice “calcium juice,” so if the first ingredient is wheat, why don’t they call it wheat sauce?
I read another weird thing as I drove by this restaurant. They were advertising to harvest bikers off the big annual holiday toy run. The reader-board sign said. “Saturday, Free Biker Breakfast.” Then it said, “Bloody Marys $3.00.”
I’m concerned.
Do we really want a bunch of bikers jacked up on bloody marys for a kids toy run?
Just asking. Especially if they’re the kind of bikers than get mean and fight. “Here you go kid... sake the soy, I mean, stake the stoy, I mean, take the toy ‘fore I beat the crap outta ya.”
America, ya gotta love it.