Day 8 - How Much Should I Eat?
Today marked the start of our second week in Tianjin. We went to the Tasly Pharmaceutical plant for a field trip; unfortunately unlike the Winery we didn’t get any free samples. Through my observations of Chinese packaged goods I have discovered that in China many of the nutritional facts of products are not included. Also, I have yet to a package which describes serving sizes per container. Granted in America few people actually follow these serving sizes but I still find interesting that such information is missing on all of Chinese packaged food products. For example if you bought a box of cereal or say a boxed meal like hamburger helper how would one know how many people the content could feed. I would find it very frustrating and confusing to try and guess how many to cook for a certain amount of people. In China however many of the families cook and prepare most if not all of their meals from scratch. They must learn my hand and by experiences how much to prepare of a certain item and how food is needed to feed a so many people. Back to the nutritional information on packaged items, sometimes have them while others don’t. For example, my Lay’s potato chips do have nutritional facts, while my Koala Yummies do don’t. I have been trying to decide what could be the determining factor that would cause some items to have the information while others do not. So far my best bet is it depends on the domestic production of the product. For example, Lay’s is an American brand and in America nutritional facts are required on all packaging. Lotte is the company that produces Koala Yummies and is based out of Tokyo Japan and I am unsure of their nutritional packaging laws.