In Delft there is a nice shop called Xotus. It is a big garden center with lots of exotic plants and flowers and also a big Asian supermarket. Here I like to buy boxes of Bapao’s in the flavor chicken or beef. I avoid the pig flavors because a pig is an impure animal.

In addition to Bapao’s I like to try new things, so usually I also buy some weird unknown product. Sometimes I make bad choices because the packaging normally does not contain any information in Dutch or English about the contents. I once bought a big carton with little river lobsters, just to find out that they are probably not meant for eating because they contain very little meat. Probably they were just for decoration. Once I got hold of a big bag of frozen duck tongues but luckily I realized it was something weird right there in the shop and could return the bad to its original place.

But usually the food I try is pretty good… pieces of crab leg that need to be fried, scrimp, strange egg-roles… they all contribute to the risk distribution I try to accomplice with the food I consume.

My last purchase was a bag of deep frozen product. The bag had Chinese text on it, so I just had the image to go on. The image contained a nice plate full of rice and vegetables. I thought it would be a bag of ready made rice, so I bought it. But no… the image on the package was again some optical illusion and it contained only frozen vegetables. The rice and the meat I had to arrange myself resulting in having to clean three pans instead of just one. Even worst, I need to return to the shop because I’m almost out of sate!