Series
Taiwan-Japan Slow Food and the Philosophy of Rhythm
This Taipei bakery has been open for more than eleven years. Egg-tart crazes, shokupan crazes: it stayed off to the side through all of them, one batch a day, made slowly. Its director lives in Tokyo. I run its marketing, and I live inside that tension: a loaf that takes eighteen hours to ferment, and how it speaks in a market that chases speed. This series is four essays on the main line, plus one prequel from what I saw at Shiseido in Yokohama in 2019. They are really about the same thing: slow is not nostalgia. It is a choice that has to be guarded.
- The Director of This Taipei Bakery Lives in Tokyo A chance meeting between Taiwan and Japan: a Tokyo fermentation master, a Japanese president born in Tainan, and a Taipei baker who guards the slow craft.
- The Engineer with Six Months to Live, and His Bread In the 1970s, an engineer given six months to live survived on the bread he made himself. This is the root of the fermentation master's "food as medicine."
- Long Fermentation in a Fast Age A system that can only go fast, that cannot choose to go slow, is a kind of loss of control.
- Egg Tarts, Shokupan, and a Bread That Refuses to Chase Trends Taiwan loves to treat food as a fast-moving product, but slow-crafted food follows a completely different logic of communication.
- Lessons from Shiseido GIC: Style Transcends Trends The confidence of a nearly 150-year-old company: it does not chase trends, because it is style itself. (2019, a prequel)
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