Top 10 Sakuma Drops, Or, Food in the Future: Your Dinner in Tablet Form

In the future, food will be served in tablet form. We've learned this from comic books and the better researched sci-fi films -- once the Earth has been depleted of its natural resources, humans will derive nutrients from synthetic, capsuled sources, and taste will become irrelevant. Luckily, the future is not now. The future is tomorrow -- unless you live in Japan, where it's already tomorrow, and years ahead technologically. Japan has been manufacturing Sakuma Drops hard candies since World War II, in flavors suspiciously like real food. Are they merely a novelty, or a taste of things to come? As we approach a new year, we may begin to consider the list below as we would an airplane menu on a flight for which we have not packed a sandwich: a reluctant necessity of survival. Or just a laugh.

The Candy Enthusiast

Sakuma Drops

10. Sake Drops
Among Sakuma's many alcohol flavored drops, Sake Drops stand apart. The flavor is surprisingly accurate, starting mild, and then building. Perhaps this is also why they are not very popular: it is one thing to sip fermented rice wine, letting it linger momentarily on your tongue before swallowing, and quite another to suck on it.

9. Sasebo Burger Drops (Sasebo Limited)
I don't know how burgers taste in the city of Sasebo, but I do know how they taste in an elementary school cafeteria in North America. They taste sort of like this.

8. Jyaga-Butter Drops
This drop recreates the taste of a baked potato with butter. Or it's supposed to. Mostly it tastes like butter, which is nice.

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beer drop

7. Sapporo Beer Drops are sweet and mild, like a Sapporo light. Of course, they're non-alcoholic, but there's a certain something that hints at the taste of alcohol. Sakuma also has an Okinawa beer drop.

6. Yaki Toukibi
That is, the combination of sweet corn with soy sauce, for which the Hokkaido prefecture is famous, in drop form. While not a very faithful translation flavor-wise (the soy sauce is missing), Yaki Toukibi drops certainly rank near the top of our list for palatability.

5. Gyoza These limited edition drops are modeled after the traditional Tochigi dumpling, filled with fish and pan-fried. Again, it's one thing to a eat fish...follow this with a breath mint.