Things in Japan: I ate tatami chopsticks
Salam and hello!
You are probably familiar with edible straw. But have you tried edible CHOPSTICKS from tatami?!
This is a tatami-flavoured “Taberareru Ohashi”, the name literally means “Edible Chopsticks”. This quality chopstick is made from 100% Kumamoto igusa, which is “rush or soft rush” in English. Soft rush is a plant used to weave tatami mats.
If you don’t know what is tatami, do you remember Nobita’s bedroom in the Japanese animation “Doraemon”? Nobita’s bedroom is a Japanese-style room, and the flooring you see there is called “tatami”. You can check more about tatami in the Related Section below.
Click to enlarge image
This “Taberareru Ohashi” is safe for humans to eat and healthy. Soft rush is highly nutritious as it is said that it has about 60 times more dietary fibre than lettuce. Also, one pair of these chopsticks holds more dietary fibre than one serving of salad*.
*A typical serving of 77g vegetable salad.
I have checked the ingredients, and it doesn’t have doubtful ingredients. Insya-Allah, Muslims can safely eat this too.
*This product is manufactured with products containing eggs, milk, shrimps and crabs.
The chopstick is thicker than regular chopsticks. It has a slight tatami–grassy–smell but not that strong. The texture is like hard biscuit that you can still easily bite into it.
The first bite tasted weird to me…I couldn’t really tell what kind of flavour it was. So, does it taste like tatami? I’ve never licked or tasted an actual tatami mat, but weirdly enough, it somewhat does taste like one (lol).
One thing you must be careful when handling this chopstick is your grip strength! I accidentally cracked quite a few of them because I gripped it too hard. Imagine you’re holding a stick. A stick won’t break or crack when you just hold it normally. Once you apply pressure or weight on the stick, only then it will break in half. So, this chopstick is similar to that.
As a chopstick, there’s not much difference. I can pick up food like any other inedible chopsticks available in the market, as long as I don’t grip it TOO strong. As a snack, not bad; I ate the broken chopsticks as snacks (lol).
If you ever wondered what tatami tastes like, why not try this chopstick?!
■ Taberareru Ohashi Online Shop
https://ohashitatami.thebase.in/
Related Section:
What is TATAMI found in Japanese houses
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