What's your comfort food? Here's mine

It's egg salad on white bread. Not great egg salad either: just egg, mayo, and I suspect more than a little sugar, all on sweet white bread (not as sweet as US white bread, mind you, which uses far too much sugar or sweetener, but sweet nonetheless). It's funny, because I had never even eaten egg salad before coming to Japan. I mean I knew what it was, of course, but that combination of mayo and egg just never appealed to me enough to have tried it.

But things changed when I came to Japan. I remember the first time I had the sandwich pictured above. It was only my second day in this country, I was on my lunch break at my company training and had gone off with one of the other trainees to a nearby convenience store. He was a vegetarian and therefore rejected almost everything he saw in the store. He settled on the egg salad sandwich. Neither of us could read Japanese very well at the time, and back then these sandwiches didn't have English labels to help us, but it looked like maybe it was only egg and no meat. Strict vegetarians don't eat eggs, as you probably know, but he was hungry and that seemed to be the only thing available, so he was willing to let it slide. In a show of solidarity with my new comrade, I opted for the same sandwich. I also was nervous about trying out any of the other food, most of which I didn't recognize, so there was that too. The egg salad sandwich seemed the most normal.

Needless to say, it was good. Better than good: it was great! So great that it became a routine part of life. I'd stop into the convenience store and pick one up at least once a week for the next several years. Eventually I moved away from it. My wife was (and remains) a health freak and she warned me that convenience store food is packed full of all kinds of bad things. I had a student who worked at a supplier for a convenience store, and she said all of the food is so unhealthy that she refuses to eat anything from there. She cautioned that if one must eat something and a convenience store is the only option, an ume rice ball is probably the least bad thing. So yeah, under the influence of health-conscious people, I moved away from convenience store food and that delicious egg salad sandwich.

But, it had become my comfort food. Nowadays whenever I feel under the weather—usually because of a headache (I get them relatively often, unfortunately)—I always feel the urge for one of these egg salad sandwiches and I end up dragging myself to the convenience store (just a block's walk from my house) to buy one. I don't like candy and rarely eat greasy foods; most of my meals are brown rice, nattō, and/or tons of veggies (I actually like these meals, so don't feel bad), so I figure even if they are loaded with nasty chemicals that I'd be better to avoid, eating one of these sandwiches one a month or so isn't going to kill me (I know, I know, famous last words...)

What's your comfort food?

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.