We're gonna be on TV

Yesterday a TV crew from Osaka paid us a visit.  They had found our spicy sausage patties in the Rakkuten rankings and wanted to film us making them.  It gave us a good excuse to clean the office and processing room.  Not that the processing room was unclean by any stretch of the imagination (I make the workers keep it spotless), but my desk took about a half a day to get down to the wood. 

Everybody says that if you see what goes into a sausage you’ll stop eating them.  I disagree with that.  That may be true for your run of the mill weenie on a stick, but we put some pretty good stuff in our snags and I don’t mind showing that off.  We use a special kind of chilled pork called SPF, which stand for Specific Pathogen Free, which means it comes from animals that are raised to be free of most of the diseases that are common in pigs, thus reducing or eliminating the need for antibiotics or chemicals.  SPF pork tends to have very negligible residues.  We only use the whole muscle leg meat and back fat, never any trimmings, and starch, sugar, salt (including Italian sea salt), and spices – many of which we grind ourselves.  We don’t add any nitrates or artificial “stuff”, although sometimes we might use an ingredient that has some artificial “stuff” in it. 

It’s not so much that I personally have any problem consuming chemicals, I’ve got a bottle of something called Pepsi Zero, sitting in front of me right now and I have no idea what in the hell is in that but I’m drinking it anyway.  It’s just that listing chemicals on a label is a big chore and I’d rather not be bothered – it turns out that a lot of folks like their sausages all-natural so my laziness works out good like that.

I was kind of hoping that there might be a hot chick involved in this whole TV filming thing, but I guess they keep those locked up in the studio, I only got a camera man and a director.  They took some shots of us grinding some pork, mixing some spices, and cooking up some patties on the grill.  And they interviewed me and since I didn’t really understand the questions I just talked.

I tried my best to be a Panda.  I read an interview one time with one of the Gaijin “Talento” who talked about how the Japanese like their foreigners to be like panda bears – different, cuddly and definitely NOT scary.  I think I came across more like a monkey than a panda, better luck next time I guess.

            You can see the whole two minutes on Saturday, May 30^th, sometime between 7:30 and 9:25 (probably around 8:20), on Shitoko Mainichi Hosou, TBS Channel 5.