Fish sauce. Liquid umami. A innocuous-seeming whiskey-toned brew that, when popped open, takes about thirty seconds to make an entire room smell like the Jersey Shore. Who wouldn’t want it in their kitchen?
I recently bought a bottle of Tra Chang fish sauce, a high-quality Thai brand, and it’s done far more for me than simply seasoning my stir-fries. It, in its inscrutable Southeast Asian way, has blown my mind.
That, friends, is a thinking man’s label, and I have spent quite awhile pondering what exactly it’s trying to convey.
At first I took it at face value: obviously, the ingredients of the sauce, apparently a fish of unknown denomination and a prawn, weigh exactly the same as an odd-perspective block of 100%. This means quality. This means the sauce is 100% composed of the things composing it. Other fish sauce brands may be content when their ingredients weigh in at only 99%, but not Tra Chang. Tra Chang will not accept a product that weighs even an ounce less than a physical representation of a mathematical abstraction.
But then I looked at the back label, which informs the consumer bashfully that the sauce’s ingredients are “anchovy-fish 70% salt 29% sugar 1%.” But the fish on the label isn’t an anchovy. And whither the prawn? Is Tra Chang entirely a lie? If you placed a block of all of Tra Chang’s untruth on a scale opposite a block of 100%, would it balance? Why is the background exploding? How many prawns would it take to equal the weight of a block of my confusion?
I feel like I can’t trust anything anymore. I swear, next someone will tell me egg creams contain neither eggs nor cream.
August 2nd, 2008 at 3:17
soju. i am dating a korean girl. where do you live in texas? austin city limits? i would like an opinion.
August 2nd, 2008 at 10:50
You’re high. That is my opinion.
August 4th, 2008 at 10:22
Man, if you stopped eating all the foods that lie to you, your options would be slim and boring indeed. At least this one lies to you in a way that sends you into an existential tizzy.
August 9th, 2008 at 18:36
What kinda creeps me out is the word “HACCP” on the label.
Which, in Russian, translates to “On a Soviet Socialist Republic.”
March 18th, 2009 at 12:12
funniest label interpretation; ever. i laughed quietly but heartily, so that anyone watching would have thought i was crazy. but nobody watches me.