RIP honey herbal jelly, ??? - 2024
Alas, we barely knew you, but those few short years we spent together were amongst the best of my life.
As a lifelong migrant, i don't tend to see changes happening in a place as they happen. Sure, some areas develop fairly quickly and from one year to the next there is a marked difference, but most real change happens over many years, and if you have itchy feet you have to be (un)lucky to land somewhere just as the change occurs.
Well, friends, change has occurred in Taiwan. A cultural upheaval, a disruption of everything that made the country great. It truly is the end of an era.
The 泰山仙草蜜 Taisun brand honey herbal jelly drink as featured in Hey Song vending machines is gone, gone, gone.
Hey Song is a transliteration of 黑松 which translates literally to Black Pine or (as i prefer to think of it) Black Forest. It's one of Taiwan's major beverage companies, and its vending machines are ubiquitous. I'm not just talking at train stations or in urban centers. In rural Taiwan, you will find a ramshackle temple in the middle of nowhere, and it will have a Hey Song vending machine out the back where you can buy cold drinks starting at 10元（around 30 cents American).
I snapped this pic on a bike ride a couple months back...
Hey Song's flagship beverage is sarsaparilla, which is a fizzy drink similar to root beer. They also have a bottled water line and various ice teas and coffees. Being a Taiwanese brand, the ice teas are depressingly sugar-free, which you will quickly discover when you're hoping for a cool refresher and get something that tastes like a mouthful of leaves instead, but hey, it wouldn't be Taiwan if they didn't utterly fail at making sweet tea.
Well, that's not fair. Taiwan guys do like to put sugar in their milk tea. I mean. Rewind. They like to put milk in their tea. I know, i know, it's sacrilege. Milk tea is as popular in Taiwan as it is in Hong Kong and Thailand for some reason, despite never having been a British colony. As a result, often there is a carton or two of sweet milk tea in the machines. Similarly, although the Hey Song coffees tend to be black and unsweetened, Starbucky milkshakes are also popular, so sometimes the vending machines have one of those too.
So, you can buy water, sarsparilla, ice tea and ice coffee. But alongside the Hey Song brand name stuff and sweetened cow milk drinks there were always a few slots dedicated to niche brands offering stereotypical Asian flavors like lychee soda, asparagus juice, coconut water and motherfucking 仙草 grass jelly. I say "were", because more and more vending machines do not carry those drinks any more.
A few months ago i noticed that some of the machines i would stop at on my weekend bike rides did not have the grass jelly option any more. At first i thought maybe the owners of this temple or that factory decided it wasn't a big seller so they swapped it out for one of the vitamin B energy drinks that are more popular with working class men, but then i started to pull over at every vending machine to see if it was a pattern.
You guys. Grass jelly is gone 😭
I don't even know what grass jelly is, except i like it. It is a slightly bitter herbal concoction with a rich, black sheen and a fun, wobbly texture like jelly (aka "jello" to Americans). Vendors sell it at the morning markets in huge sheet pans of gloopy goodness, and i have no fucking idea what people do with it when they buy that much. For the average person, you are most likely to encounter it as an optional addition to bubble tea, or occasionally as a standalone refreshing dessert, perhaps on shaved ice or with tofu pudding. (In Guangdong they also used to also serve it with mango, coconut milk and/or pearl sago.)
Grass jelly rules.
Taisun honey herbal jelly was one of the first memorable food or drink experiences i had in Taiwan, back when i first stepped foot in the country in 2017. The most touristy corner of Kaohsiung is the old dockyards (now an arts district) and the nearby mountain, which is famous for its cheeky monkeys and wild dogs. On the most well-trodden corner of the mountain there is a temple and an old British Consulate building that all the tourists go to see. And next to that building is a Hey Song vending machine where i bought my first grass jelly drink.
It rolled out of the machine and i cracked it open, standing in the beating sun, looking across the brightly-colored flowers, down the twisting staircases and out to the seas i had just spent several weeks crossing. I brought the drink to my lips and it was cool and sweet. It is pretty much just sugar-water, after all. But the gimmick is the tiny little squares of grass jelly - harder, greener and more chewy than the quivering mass sold in the market, but still holding a slightly bitter flavor inside a package that makes you feel like a kid again, munching on candy with mystical medicinal properties. It was life-changing.
Of course, i am playing it up a bit, because i had had grass jelly drinks before, both canned from Asian grocery stores and in various bubble teas, but goddamnit some things taste better when you're drinking them in the context of standing on a mountain surrounded by monkeys in the shade of bright red dragons writhing their way up a green steepled roof as salty sweat drips into your eyes.
Since that day, whenever i have been thirsty on the road in Taiwan, i make my way to a temple, and unless there is a guy there selling homemade drinks or icy treats, i drop my 10 kuai into the vending machine and listen for the satisfying "clunk" of the grass jelly can rolling out.
And now those days are gone!
The funny thing is that as a foreigner in Asia you can lament how all the "authentic" local stuff is disappearing, to be replaced by the same kind of boring snacks you can find all over the world, but if you speak to actual local kids, they don't necessarily see this stuff as authentically Taiwanese, they just see it as old-fashioned and backwards or hick.
工作很苦悶?喝口仙草蜜，把日子過得仙一點~ (they're trying...)
I still get that look of bemusement from my colleagues when i reveal that i go to the markets to buy local food from local vendors. No young people - by which mean i mean people under 50 - and certainly not professional young people would be caught dead buying produce from a street vendor. Why buy sweet potato greens grown in the fields 20 minutes out of town, or pork that was slaughtered this morning, when you could buy imported beef and broccoli?
Sigh. It makes me wonder how many people will just roll over when the Chinese put up their naval blockade. However will the yuppies of Taiwan survive without access to cheese and blueberries and red wine?
Anywho, the point is, grass jelly is no more. There is now very little in the Hey Song machines that give me the same pleasure. Some of them have a sweet 紅茶 red [black] tea without milk that is acceptably refreshing, if nothing on the grass jelly of yore. I did see one that still had a coconut water a few months ago, but i haven't seen that recently either. It would be alright if Taiwan had as many drinks and juice vendors around the place as Colombia, but it does not.
Today, though, i decided to see if one of the street vendors i do know of was in his usual spot, and...
Yes! A home made lemonade to cool off from the tropical heat. I also picked up a 豬血糕 "pig blood cake". It's a lot more appetizing than it sounds. The closest thing in western cuisine is black pudding. The pig blood cake is essentially a square of glutinous rice with (i guess) enough blood in the mixture to turn it black, dipped in chili sauce and then coated in ground peanut dust and chopped cilantro. If pig blood wasn't right there in the name, it could pass for something vegan.
It was a decent bike ride, 3 hours or so. I didn't go far because i got sidetracked in the morning playing computer games. I spent a bit of time sitting under a tree surrounded by yellow blossoms as bright as my happy-making weekend tank.
Tomorrow it's back to the grind.
As a lifelong migrant, i don't tend to see changes happening in a place as they happen. Sure, some areas develop fairly quickly and from one year to the next there is a marked difference, but most real change happens over many years, and if you have itchy feet you have to be (un)lucky to land somewhere just as the change occurs.
Well, friends, change has occurred in Taiwan. A cultural upheaval, a disruption of everything that made the country great. It truly is the end of an era.
The 泰山仙草蜜 Taisun brand honey herbal jelly drink as featured in Hey Song vending machines is gone, gone, gone.
Hey Song is a transliteration of 黑松 which translates literally to Black Pine or (as i prefer to think of it) Black Forest. It's one of Taiwan's major beverage companies, and its vending machines are ubiquitous. I'm not just talking at train stations or in urban centers. In rural Taiwan, you will find a ramshackle temple in the middle of nowhere, and it will have a Hey Song vending machine out the back where you can buy cold drinks starting at 10元（around 30 cents American).
I snapped this pic on a bike ride a couple months back...
Hey Song's flagship beverage is sarsaparilla, which is a fizzy drink similar to root beer. They also have a bottled water line and various ice teas and coffees. Being a Taiwanese brand, the ice teas are depressingly sugar-free, which you will quickly discover when you're hoping for a cool refresher and get something that tastes like a mouthful of leaves instead, but hey, it wouldn't be Taiwan if they didn't utterly fail at making sweet tea.
Well, that's not fair. Taiwan guys do like to put sugar in their milk tea. I mean. Rewind. They like to put milk in their tea. I know, i know, it's sacrilege. Milk tea is as popular in Taiwan as it is in Hong Kong and Thailand for some reason, despite never having been a British colony. As a result, often there is a carton or two of sweet milk tea in the machines. Similarly, although the Hey Song coffees tend to be black and unsweetened, Starbucky milkshakes are also popular, so sometimes the vending machines have one of those too.
So, you can buy water, sarsparilla, ice tea and ice coffee. But alongside the Hey Song brand name stuff and sweetened cow milk drinks there were always a few slots dedicated to niche brands offering stereotypical Asian flavors like lychee soda, asparagus juice, coconut water and motherfucking 仙草 grass jelly. I say "were", because more and more vending machines do not carry those drinks any more.
A few months ago i noticed that some of the machines i would stop at on my weekend bike rides did not have the grass jelly option any more. At first i thought maybe the owners of this temple or that factory decided it wasn't a big seller so they swapped it out for one of the vitamin B energy drinks that are more popular with working class men, but then i started to pull over at every vending machine to see if it was a pattern.
You guys. Grass jelly is gone 😭
I don't even know what grass jelly is, except i like it. It is a slightly bitter herbal concoction with a rich, black sheen and a fun, wobbly texture like jelly (aka "jello" to Americans). Vendors sell it at the morning markets in huge sheet pans of gloopy goodness, and i have no fucking idea what people do with it when they buy that much. For the average person, you are most likely to encounter it as an optional addition to bubble tea, or occasionally as a standalone refreshing dessert, perhaps on shaved ice or with tofu pudding. (In Guangdong they also used to also serve it with mango, coconut milk and/or pearl sago.)
Grass jelly rules.
Taisun honey herbal jelly was one of the first memorable food or drink experiences i had in Taiwan, back when i first stepped foot in the country in 2017. The most touristy corner of Kaohsiung is the old dockyards (now an arts district) and the nearby mountain, which is famous for its cheeky monkeys and wild dogs. On the most well-trodden corner of the mountain there is a temple and an old British Consulate building that all the tourists go to see. And next to that building is a Hey Song vending machine where i bought my first grass jelly drink.
It rolled out of the machine and i cracked it open, standing in the beating sun, looking across the brightly-colored flowers, down the twisting staircases and out to the seas i had just spent several weeks crossing. I brought the drink to my lips and it was cool and sweet. It is pretty much just sugar-water, after all. But the gimmick is the tiny little squares of grass jelly - harder, greener and more chewy than the quivering mass sold in the market, but still holding a slightly bitter flavor inside a package that makes you feel like a kid again, munching on candy with mystical medicinal properties. It was life-changing.
Of course, i am playing it up a bit, because i had had grass jelly drinks before, both canned from Asian grocery stores and in various bubble teas, but goddamnit some things taste better when you're drinking them in the context of standing on a mountain surrounded by monkeys in the shade of bright red dragons writhing their way up a green steepled roof as salty sweat drips into your eyes.
Since that day, whenever i have been thirsty on the road in Taiwan, i make my way to a temple, and unless there is a guy there selling homemade drinks or icy treats, i drop my 10 kuai into the vending machine and listen for the satisfying "clunk" of the grass jelly can rolling out.
And now those days are gone!
The funny thing is that as a foreigner in Asia you can lament how all the "authentic" local stuff is disappearing, to be replaced by the same kind of boring snacks you can find all over the world, but if you speak to actual local kids, they don't necessarily see this stuff as authentically Taiwanese, they just see it as old-fashioned and backwards or hick.
Click to view工作很苦悶?喝口仙草蜜，把日子過得仙一點~ (they're trying...)
I still get that look of bemusement from my colleagues when i reveal that i go to the markets to buy local food from local vendors. No young people - by which mean i mean people under 50 - and certainly not professional young people would be caught dead buying produce from a street vendor. Why buy sweet potato greens grown in the fields 20 minutes out of town, or pork that was slaughtered this morning, when you could buy imported beef and broccoli?
Sigh. It makes me wonder how many people will just roll over when the Chinese put up their naval blockade. However will the yuppies of Taiwan survive without access to cheese and blueberries and red wine?
Anywho, the point is, grass jelly is no more. There is now very little in the Hey Song machines that give me the same pleasure. Some of them have a sweet 紅茶 red [black] tea without milk that is acceptably refreshing, if nothing on the grass jelly of yore. I did see one that still had a coconut water a few months ago, but i haven't seen that recently either. It would be alright if Taiwan had as many drinks and juice vendors around the place as Colombia, but it does not.
Today, though, i decided to see if one of the street vendors i do know of was in his usual spot, and...
Yes! A home made lemonade to cool off from the tropical heat. I also picked up a 豬血糕 "pig blood cake". It's a lot more appetizing than it sounds. The closest thing in western cuisine is black pudding. The pig blood cake is essentially a square of glutinous rice with (i guess) enough blood in the mixture to turn it black, dipped in chili sauce and then coated in ground peanut dust and chopped cilantro. If pig blood wasn't right there in the name, it could pass for something vegan.
It was a decent bike ride, 3 hours or so. I didn't go far because i got sidetracked in the morning playing computer games. I spent a bit of time sitting under a tree surrounded by yellow blossoms as bright as my happy-making weekend tank.
Tomorrow it's back to the grind.