Japanese Food Models, Yesterday and Today

Fun fact: you can pay a few tens of dollars at a factory tour to try your hand at making them yourself. They start you with cabbage and shrimp tempura, which are easy enough to succeed at after an hour of practice. Very fun. Cabbage involves pouring molten wax in a thin layer over a hot water bath then waiting for it to congeal on the surface of the water and pinching it with your hands while still pliable. After you get it in the desired folded shape you quench it in a cold water bath and it sets almost instantly.

[Edit to add: doh, that detail is all in the article.]

Ask me if you're ever going through Gifu and want to try -- I can point you in the right direction. They are, ahem, not used to foreigners figuring out how to book tours but happy to share the wonder of Japanese plastic food with the world.

It is often said that in our age of assembly lines and mass production there’s no room for the individual craftsman, the artist in wood or metal who made so many of the treasures of the past. Like most generalizations, this simply isn’t true. He’s rarer now, of course, but he’s certainly not extinct. He has often had to change his vocation, but in his modest way he still flourishes. Even on the island of Manhattan he may be found, if you know where to look for him. Where rents are low and fire regulations unheard of, his minute, cluttered workshops may be discovered in the basements of apartment houses or in the upper storeys of derelict shops. He may no longer make violins or cuckoo clocks or music boxes, but the skills he uses are the same as they always were, and no two objects he creates are ever identical. He is not contemptuous of mechanization: you will find several electric hand tools under the debris on his bench. He has moved with the times: he will always be around, the universal odd-job man who is never aware of it when he makes an immortal work of art.

-- Arthur C. Clarke, "Security Check"

Interesting to see these are so high-end. My experience in Shanghai is that food models exist, but only restaurants in mall food courts use them (where a food court is defined as a collection of restaurants that all accept a special-purpose payment card). Higher-end independent restaurants (for example, maybe there's a collection of restaurants on floor B1 that don't all accept a shared special-purpose payment card) just use photos, and street shops have a forbidding text-only menu on the wall.

The pickled plum flash drive mentioned in the article looks like something straight out of a Cronenberg movie: http://fakefoodjapan.com/products/umeboshi_pickled_plum_larg...

that hand looks like it's made of carrots