This Can Tricked Me — As Seen In Japan

The other day, I was walking through the grocery store with my wife when something caught my eye. I stopped and took a look at these two friendly cans:

What’s in there? I wondered. Upon inspecting the text, I saw that the one on the left says “Plain panda,” and the one on the right says “choco-chip panda.”

Surely that can’t be it, I thought.

I consulted Eriko.

“There’s not… there’s not panda in there, is there?” I asked.

She laughed. “This is joke,” she said.

I’ll explain.

The first part, I had correct. “Choco-chip.” So whatever this thing is, it’s chocolate chip-flavored. Maybe panda meat tastes good with chocolate chips in it; I don’t know.

The second part was where the problem came in. I was correct, it did say “panda,” but that’s not what it meant. In Japanese, often a phrase will end with “da,” which without getting too into the weeds basically means “That’s what’s in here.” So in reality, it said “Pan-da,” or “Pan is what’s in here.”

“Pan,” of course, means bread. So inside this can is chocolate chip bread, not chocolate chip panda. The reason the can looks like a panda is because the makers recognized that it sounds like they’re saying the can has panda in it, so they employed this little play on words.

Very funny. Also made me look very stupid.

This is Japanese emergency bread. You keep it in your house for when there’s an earthquake or another dire situation, and then you will have bread ready to eat. I was curious how it would taste, so we took one home and popped the top.

At first glance, it looks a bit like a can of dog food. We slid out the poop-colored log and heated it up in the microwave for 20 seconds.

It had a sort of pastry consistency, and was fairly easy to cut and eat. It wasn’t hard like a brick, so that was good. However, the taste was a bit lacking.

It was certainly dry, though not unbearably so. It was bland, but not offensively so. It tasted bad, but not so bad as to be interesting, like natto. Mostly, it was just a bland chocolate loaf. The pieces with the chocolate chips were all right, but the rest was uninteresting. Eriko kind of liked it. We almost finished it.

On second thought, I’d rather have panda meat.

To conclude, I would not recommend eating panda bread unless you are genuinely in an emergency. However, for a food that’s only to be eaten when absolutely necessary, it’s not that terrible. 15/10.

And I can hold my head high, knowing that I now understand a Japanese word joke. Good on me.