Two people in Japan choked to death eating New Year’s rice cakes, four others hospitalized

[allenk]

Reminder: mochi means two very different food experiences. The stuff you get at Trader Joe’s, while yummy, is not the deadly kind Mark is warning us about.

Beware the dangers of mochi

I’m pretty sure this is conflating two different Japanese food products that are both called “mochi” here in the U.S. 99% of the mochi one meets in the U.S. is of the pictured kind, the dessert. But there is another, much more common in Japan than here, which appears to be what you would get were you to take ordinary semi-cooked rice and put it in a hydraulic press until it became a single, massive, squishy rice grain. The definition of “dessert” in Japan is… foreign. It includes, for example, …