Our Health CONdition levels are measurements of our overall bodily health security, a function of what we eat, drink, and do during our time in Tokyo.  HCON is an assessment of our health risk.  Simply put, we’re already at war.  Weeks of rice, eggs, rice, instant coffee, eggs, bread, instant coffee, etc. have sunk our nutrition levels so low.  Both Rob and I have googled “scurvy”…

I’ll have some posts coming up which explain in more detail what our diet situation is and what we’ve been eating, but here I’d like to show you what we haven’t been eating – and why.

Seriously, why is it so hard to buy healthy things?

100 Y is about $1.10, so 1 normal pear costs about $2.20.  To get vitamin C from fresh fruit, we would pay almost  75 cents per Mandarin orange.  At these prices, I would eat the pear stem and savor the orange rind, perhaps even chewing on the seeds until they either went safely into my stomach or became a choking hazard.  All fruit is similarly priced, so needless to say, fruit is not a part of our diet.

Vegetables are definitely cheaper, but only ones that are a staple part of the Japanese diet, usually meaning they are not part of the American vegetable diet.  We’re not really sure what to do with most of these cheap vegetables other than rip them to shreds and eat them (and actually I’m the only one that will do that).  Online recipes work well in some situations, but they’re not very helpful for cooking with ingredients you didn’t even know existed.

So the occasional leaves of Chinese cabbage are one of our main sources of nutrition in Tokyo, and most of the time we get by wistfully wandering around the produce section and wishing that a banana bunch didn’t cost over twice what a corndog does…