The Consulate General of Israel in Shanghai recently was surprised to discover on the shelves of a local supermarket chain a canned beverage called "The Jew's Ear Juice."
The drink is made of a black mushroom which does resemble a wrinkled ear.
Israel's Consul-General in Shanghai Jackie Eldan stressed that this was not a case of anti-Semitism, as Judaism is considered in China a synonym of success.
According to Eldan, the juice's manufacturer must have thought that linking it to the Jewish ear would be profitable.
And from the JC blog
Anyone fancy some Jew's Ear Juice?
You've heard of Yinglish - the mixture of Yiddish and English? Now, courtesy of the New York Times, comes Chinglish - the mixture of Chinese and English:
For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”
A quick search on Google shows this stuff actually comes in a can - and is a black fungus juice. What it has to do with Jews still remains unclear, but one blogger ran a review:
It’s a nasty-looking thick semi-transparent cloudy brown liquid. It’s smell is weird, like a mix between the apple vinegar drink and turkey gravy. It’s a little thick and slimy, but the flavor is actually mild. The flavor isn’t anything at all like the cooked wood ear that I’m used to eating. It’s so strange that it tastes like bland, bad, old apple cider...
Well, what do you expect with a name like 'Jew's Ear Juice'?
A comment here explains:
The jew’s ear is actually a type of edible wild mushroom, and jew’s ear used to be a general term for all edible wild mushrooms, though this usage of the term has long fallen out of favour due to heavy pressure from the Jewish lobby. Ok, I made that last part up. But the rest is true.
And a pic of a Jew's Ear Bottle Opener from here.
Another comment: I assume they meant "The juicier juice"
One of those sites asks the most important question of all: "Yes, but is it kosher?"
And finally, here's another strange beverage available in China...
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