Brown Sauce Bemuses Chinese Shoppers

One thing I have found myself doing a lot in China is asking Chinese friends, "what's this food?", "what's that?", "is this nice?", "do you really eat this?" before trying things in cafes or sometimes just when noticing some of the many strange looking packets, bottles, jars or boxes in shops or outdoor foodstalls. Of course there is a huge, huge difference in food products generally available as snacks, ingredients or dishes in Asian foods compared to those in Europe, more than I imagined and so many of which I was barely or completely unaware of before.

This I found out yesterady of course works the other way too, when I read an article about Tesco opening their new store in Beijing. Here's an excerpt

Most of the products on sale are Chinese, including soy sauce, sheep's feet and even live turtles.
There is one rather forlorn aisle selling food from the United Kingdom, including sage-and-onion stuffing and mint jelly.

A tin of baked beans and a bottle of Tesco's brown sauce seemed to perplex the early customers."I'm not sure that these are the baked beans, and it might be a Chinese-style yellow bean sauce," one person said at the opening. "This brown sauce, I think it's probably a fish-egg sauce or maybe a banana sauce."

It made me laugh and was comforting to see Chinese people also having the same bemused thoughts about European food products at times.