Many supermarkets have an aisle for various ethnic foods such as Asian, Hispanic, Italian, and Kosher food aisles with specialties varying from coconut milk to Thai rice noodles and cans of sea food and shell fish imported from Japan and other Asian countries. In 2010, California imported about $325 million in food products from Japan.
Do your children enjoy a wide variety of ethnic food in their school, neighborhood or on tripos with you? Or would your children prefer just one or two kinds of food, for example mainly the ethnic food you cook at home? Do you serve children the standard Western diet or an ethnic diet? Do your kids prefer soft comfort foods such as mashe potatoes, tuna salad, or casseroles?
Or would they rather eat crunchy salads and nuts or harder to chew foods such as crackers, tacos and pretzels? Do your children eat pizza, Italian foods, or Mexican and other Hispanic foods frequently? Which ethnic foods are preferred by your children? Is the food different or similar to what the child eats at home or at school?
Some children enjoy puddings, ice cream, mac and cheese, or soups more than they'd like to eat foods they would have to work harder to chew such as cuts of meat, chips, and sandwiches on crusty French or Italian-style bread? Do you bake your own bread? Are your children eating mostly Asian foods, European foods, or a mixture of take-out and fast-foods? Do your kids like nori sea vegetable rolls with slices of carrot, avocado, raw cabbage, and perhaps a pickle slice in the middle?
Japan, though is a multi-billion dollar food market in imports to the USA. For example, $40.7 billion dollar imports came from Japan to the USA last year, according to the Sacramento Bee article which referred to its source as Beacon Economics, a consulting firm in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. What topped the imported foods list from Japan was fresh, frozen, and dried fish, as far as what foods are imported from Japan to California.
The value of fish and other seafood imports from Japan to California amounts to $79 million annually. Additionally, condiments imported from Japan such as sauces (wasabi, soy, and other condiments) amounted to $73.4 million each year.
That's a lot of Japanese foods on supermarket and specialty food store shelves, including what you find in Sacramento. Add on top of that what you'll eat in Japanese restaurants. Sacramento has a sizable Japanese American community as do surrounding areas such as San Francisco and larger California cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego.
You have a lot of imported foods in the USA with Asian and Hispanic foods topping the list. But you won't find many fresh fruits and vegetables coming from Japan. The ginger you see on supermarket produce shelves often comes from other Asian countries and Fiji, for example.
Then you have the Asian Indian food market here as well with Indian, Middle Eastern, Mexican (Hispanic) and Chinese, Japanese, and other specialty food markets in Sacramento. Arden Arcade's Fulton Avenue has numerous food markets catering to the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean imported foods shopper, and includes anyone else interested in various ethnic foods. You'd more likely find various dried vegetables and packaged, dried foods and condiments coming from Japan. A certain amount of garlic powder comes from China and is then distributed by USA companies.
Don't worry about what you'll eat in area Japanese restaurants. The restaurants don't want to lose business. But the only way a shopper can know for sure is to rely on the restaurants who have contacts with Japanese fish vendors. Can you rely on the Japanese fish vendors selling quality food to Japanese restaurant owners all over the USA?
That's why you have monitoring and tests in place for safeguards. Again, you still have to watch the watchers and question whether the monitoring and the tests will cover all imported foods. Local restaurants are paying more for a fish that they know has been monitored and tested, and they're absorbing the increase in price of getting safe to eat seafood.
Sacramento consumers would like to know that the fish they eat in any restaurant or buy from any food market here is safe and has been tested for any contaminants whether it's radiation or heavy metals or other toxins. The FDA says Japanese milk is not allowed to be imported to the USA now, but little is sent to the US.
So when you buy that can of Asian food that says it's imported from some other Asian country, ask yourself the following question: How do you know that food wasn't first sent from Japan to another Asian country, canned or packaged, and then sent to the USA as imported from some other country?
That's a question shoppers are asking. Of course, you could buy local produce and get your seafood from canned, wild-caught salmon from Arctic waters, for example Iceland. But how do you know that your Alaskan, wild-caught fish didn't pick up radiation from Japan or the Aleutian islands? That's the questions some Sacramento shoppers need to ask. Can the FDA answer those consumers' questions?
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