tried eating pork collagen right now, i have no real idea of how to eat it because i couldn't find any real recipes when i looked online (just articles about how it's used in beauty products) - it said on the package you can eat it as-is with vinager, or fry it. so i tried it both as-is and fried and it's pretty tasteless and a little crunchy, and gets cold really fast so the frying is pointless. it seems to have helped my eyes a little (less than real fat does) and my skin feels softer now so i guess it was still healthy after all...

other stuff i've been trying:
liver, random seaweed and seafood, fish cake (still smelled like fish and didn't seem to make me sick, unlike its european counterpart), finally found warm, baked sweet potato in one shop but they weren't very warm and i'm not sure they were baked all the way through (were super cheap though, only 80 yen for a big potato). as usual 95% of the items in grocery stores have wheat and/or sugar in them, but there's so little imported stuff that it's still pretty refreshing, i can see all the raw ingredients then glance around the shop and see pre-made stuff that uses all the same things. i'm just kinda upset that even though they have TONS of "traditional" dried fish and dried seaweed as snacks, ALL i've looked at except for 2 of them so far have sugar added. all their dried fruit also has sugar but that's also how it is in sweden so...

also found my first "bad-quality" sushi etc at a grocery store yesterday; there's some place called donkey hut or something like that which is a huge shop (multiple storeys) just PACKED full of stuff, it apparently had an incident a few years ago where after an arson 3 employees died because there was so much crap everywhere they couldn't find the store exit in the fire. a lot of the sushi was missing ingredients on the ingredients labels (really obviously, ex. not even listing seaweed), and when i bought one that seemed safe the rice was dry and the fish just didn't taste so good...

it's really funny how right around our neighbourhood there's a ton of foreigners, and as soon as you walk 10-15 minutes away there's NONE. also the cashiers don't normally ask us if we have point cards etc even though they ask all the japanese people; which is fine with me because asking every time is super annoying.

today some teacher went around giving us exchange students pumpkin cake. to the one student who can't have gluten, instead of cake they got a handful of candy.

i didn't get anything. now, i know my diet is weird, but the thing is you could just give me a banana or piece of seaweed or something (something you can buy at the school convenience store!), anything at all shows that you were thinking of me (which is what i imagine the cake/candy is for, right?).

once people understand that i can't eat added sugar/wheat they really get the impression that i literally can't eat anything at all... but the thing is, i can eat ANY food as long as YOU haven't put sugar in it. this simply means you can't BUY the food, you have to actually make it in most cases -- which comes to my second point of that apparently no one cooks anymore.

we're all sitting around feeling goodwill from some cake you bought at the store, but actually, i could've just gone out on my lunch break and bought it myself. i'm not complaining exactly but it somehow feels a little shallow if you think of it that way. y'know how back in the day, at a potluck they'd bring their most expensive items to give away to the guests just to prove they had tons of money? yeah.... you have the money to buy a cake. on our first day of class a different teacher handed out persimmons to everyone, and i thought that was really great - doesn't have gluten, nuts, dairy or anything else a lot of people have problems with, and it's a fruit you see hanging from trees in your japanese neighbourhood.

no traditional japanese food has sugar in it. the average person didn't have sugar back then. the problem is, the meaning of "traditional" now apparently means "dating from around 50 years ago" (throwing away the hundreds and thousands of other food history we have). there's a ton of stuff like dango which is NOT made from wheat or anything bad at all ——— until they put sugary syrup sauce on it, and they apparently don't sell it anywhere without sauce. same for grilled meat.

anyway. i was just thinking about food again because i wanted to invite my japanese friend to watch some harry potter movies (in japanese) since he loves them and we wanted to watch them too, but i wanted to try making some harry potter themed food to go with it... well apparently all they eat in harry potter is breadstuff and SWEETS. if i'm really really lucky i can figure out how to make some kind of amazake ice cream with carbonated water and sweet potato bits and pass it off as butterbeer...