Product name – Living Fungus Milk

Real contents – Unknown

Found at – Supermarket

I was shopping at an upmarket Japanese supermarket called “Jusco” when I found this carton. It was fairly expensive, but I had to investigate it. The picture seemed to indicate that “living fungus milk” is a traditional English foxhunting drink. Having lived in England for 22 years or so I didn’t recall ever having heard of it, but then again I’ve never been to a hunt and who knows what crazy stuff goes on there?
I still had my doubts that there really was such a thing as “living fungus milk” but the label was very clear on this point:

I opened the carton and poured the contents into a plastic receptacle. On first glance it looked like… well… milk. Just ordinary milk. Maybe quite thickly textured milk, but still milk.

Drinking it didn’t seem like much of a challenge. It smelled like watery yoghurt, utterly inoffensive and not particularly interesting.

It tasted exactly like an unflavoured yoghurt drink and not like any kind of fungus. There were no bits of mushroom in it and nothing unusual to report at all.
The back of the carton provided an explanation. Evidently a translation expert somewhere doesn’t understand the difference between fungus and bacteria.