Beans Snack!!!

Y’all may remember a while ago I mentioned that when I go to the Japanese market for low-carb noodles, that–just to figure out what kind of product I’m holding in my hand–I often have to rely on tiny nutritional labels slapped on by the importer. Sometimes the product name on the label is kind of comically descriptive, like “Corn Snack.”

Well, I can’t eat Corn Snack (too high in carbs), but I just found one I can eat: Beans Snack!

I am so totally amused by Beans Snack. It has so many great things going for it.

1) With only six grams of carb per serving, and three of that fiber, I can indulge in Beans Snack . . . in moderation.

2) It has a really cool package with all these little green pea Japanese warrior-lookin’ dudes performing incomprehensible tasks. They are so cool! I wonder if they’re the Japanese equivalent of the California Raisins (remember those “Heard It Through The Grape Vine” commercials about fifteen years ago?). Maybe the Beans Snack pea-warriors are part of a major advertising campaign over there or something. I sure hope so.

3) The helpful English nutritional label was written by someone who speaks Japanese rather than English as his native language. You can tell because of the Engrish name of the product: “Beans Snack.”

Now, obviously that’s not what we could call such a product in English. We’d have fancy-schmancy made-up name like “Beanoritos” or something. But I assume that’s the case in Japanese, too. “Beans Snack” is probably an attempted description and not a translation of the product’s name (which I assume is either “Calbee” or “Saya Endo Sappari Shio-Aji”; probably the latter). Yet a native-English speaker wouldn’t have called it that, as you can tell by two things:

a) The principle ingredient of Beans Snack isn’t beans at all but green peas (hence the little green pea warrior dudes). A native English-speaker would know that green peas aren’t considered beans (at least the way they are popularly spoken of, regardless of what a botanist might tell you).

b) We’ve got a plural adjective here: “Beans.” The thing is, English doesn’t have plural adjectives. We pluralize our nouns, but not our adjectives. Thus we might have “a bunch of grapes” (“grape” functioning as a noun) but not “grapes soda” (“grape” functioning as an adjective). In Japanese, the rules regarding pluralization are very different: There isn’t any, at least normally. Japanese nouns (and adjectives) don’t inflect (change form) for number, so they are neither singular nor plural (or both singular and plural, depending on how you look at it).

The Japanese-speaking label-writer knew that English does have plural nouns and misinterpreted “bean” as a noun in this case. Since peas normally come in a group, he used what he thought was a proper English plural form, not realizing that here the word is an adjective and adjectives in English don’t inflect for number.

4) Beans Snack actually tastes good! It has a kind of . . . well, green pea taste. A little salty. A little sweet, but not very much. It has a nice, crunchy texture. After sampling it, I find myself thinking “Hey, I’d like some more Beans Snack now!” It’s one of those hard-to-eat-just-one snacks.

Low carb . . . cute package . . . comical and interesting language issue . . . good taste. What more could you want in a snack?

Three cheers for Beans Snack!!!

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin