On a rainy day in June, the exhibition halls inside Tokyo Big Sight were brightly lit, accentuating the metallic gleam of the high-tech equipment on display at the Japan Food Machinery Manufacturers¡¯ Association expo.
The atmosphere was slightly disorienting, a cross between a county science fair and a car show ¡ª complete with young women in brightly colored skimpy costumes who demonstrated the products with rehearsed enthusiasm. I made my way through clusters of black-suited businessmen, past fast-and-furious mechanized slicers, mammoth mixers, and giant defrosters built by companies with masculine-sounding names ending in ¡°x¡°: Dremax, Mondomix and Radix.
FOOMA is quite possibly the nerdiest trade show I¡¯ve ever experienced ¡ª and I am no stranger to the nerdy side of food and beverage production. Despite the event¡¯s seemingly narrow appeal, nearly 100,000 people braved the stormy weather to attend this year. My editor, when proposing the assignment, had made a jokey comparison with Comiket, the massive manga market that attracts half a million visitors to each session. Perhaps for this reason, I had arrived expecting to see robots and instant-meal preparation contraptions ¡ª real-life manifestations of the futuristic visions conjured by the avant-garde architecture group Archigram or artist Kenji Yanobe.
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