4-Panel No-Picture 116

[4-Panel No-Picture: The Elder of Freshness]

The evolution of retort-pouch foods in recent years is truly remarkable.

Just by heating them in boiling water or a microwave for a few dozen seconds, curries, pastas, and authentic Chinese dishes that rival those of specialty restaurants appear before your eyes.

Technological progress is so staggering that they now reign on the dining table not as a "shortcut," but as a "deliberately chosen feast."

When you unravel the history of this convenient food culture, it turns out that the world's first commercially available retort food was that very "Bon Curry" developed by Otsuka Foods.

Having supported Japanese dining tables through the Showa, Heisei, and Reiwa eras, they are truly the great legends of the retort world.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The greatest and most powerful weapon of retort food is, above all else, its "long shelf life."

Even if left tossed in the back of a shelf at room temperature, it stubbornly maintains its taste and quality for months, or in some cases, even years.

For ordinary food, it is the natural order of things to spoil, rot, and fade over time.

But they, clad in sturdy armor called a pouch, continue to maintain that "freshly made moment" as if time had stopped.

In a sense, it is packed with technology akin to immortality, completely rejecting the flow of time.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
When you think about it carefully, this is a rather absurd and interesting phenomenon.

We usually say things about food like,
"Freshness is life,"
"Freshly caught or freshly made is the most delicious."

and worship freshness as if it were the greatest selling point.

Yet, we gratefully stockpile the exact opposite—"things that haven't changed at all even a year after being made"—and gobble them up, calling them delicious.

In a world of "freshness" where value drops as time passes, "retort" is the elder of the freshness world whose value doesn't budge even when time passes.

We let these two contradictory values coexist in our daily lives with a straight face.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Thinking about it that way, my own contrarian nature, which people tell me is "too old for that" or "outdated," feels like it's just like a retort pouch.

There is no need to force myself to match the "freshness" of the trends of the times.

No matter how dizzyingly the common sense of the world changes, I can just let my eccentricity, which hasn't changed for years, mature as it is deep inside the pouch.

A stubborn soup with an infinite shelf life, waiting quietly for its turn in the corner of a shelf, unseen by anyone.

When someone eventually opens me up thinking, "I want to eat something a little different," surprising their brain with raw, unchanging sophistry that has lasted for years is my secret pleasure now (lol).