Japan's food shortage started about a year ago. I stopped seeing butter on the shelves at the grocery store. I thought that perhaps I was just hitting the store at the wrong time of day. Once I started asking my friends, we realized that we all were having the same problem.
Google shed some light, and sent me to a May 3, 2008, article in TIME magazine.
Since then, butter has been a thing to hoard. At times, grocery stores have had notices requesting customers to limit their purchase to one package.
Last month while going through Costco, I looked, as always, to see if there might perchance be any butter. No.
Then as I walked through the frozen foods section, near the ice cream, I saw a sign for butter, but I didn't see the packages. Until I looked more closely. The butter was in a big cardboard box.
The sign proclaimed:
25 kilograms of butter for about US$500.
That's a 55-pound box!
That's a LOT of money!
I prefer to buy my butter in 200 gram packages.
1 comment:
Strange, I hadn't noticed. I'm always able to buy 'butter', by which I mean 'fat spread'!
Did the article give a reason for the 'food shortage'?
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