When Choice Isn’t Good
There are times when choice isn’t good. Like when you are shopping for fish-sauce. You will never feel quite so helpless as when you are facing a dozen different choices for bottled runoff from fermented anchovies, and you have no idea which option is good, and which one will make you wish you were dead a few hours after ingesting it. To make it worse, I couldn’t read any of the handful of Asian scripts on the bottles, so I was pretty much flying blind.
All of my options basically said, “Ingredients: water, anchovies, salt, sugar.” So, I made an assumption: Higher price means better quality. Of course, this is a big assumption; “higher price” could also mean “company had to settle more lawsuits,” or “company had to bribe more authorities to stay out of hot water.” But, I’m not thinking about that.
I settled on this “Double Parrot” fish-sauce; being about the third-highest in the price category, it has to be good, right? It didn’t make me sick, anyway, and it did give a nice subtle flavor to the yellow curry I made. Maybe next time I will be adventurous and try something else.