Cockroach

Few years back, I learned from Time magazine that a KitKat bar isn't the same all over the planet; a Russian KitKat is smaller than a Bulgarian one, and the chocolate isn't as sweet as in a German one. The Nescafé instant coffee won't taste the same everywhere, too. There are around 200 different types of Nescafé, including the "three-in-one" sachets that we buy locally.

If the ice cream, tomato soup, chocolate – and what not – require modification to find the balance of local taste, it shouldn't be surprising that the most successful foodstuff for the cockroaches need to be prepared for the indigenous population. That's a simple truth that I learned recently. Before that, I'd been buying Japanese product to attract the cockroaches in my house – to no avail.

Just before giving up the ambition to clear the cockroaches, I thought of buying the genuinely local cockroach food that caters for the culture of our own cockroaches. The level of food consumption – or food poisoning if truth be told – by the cockroaches in my house is much higher than the days when I supplied them the imported Japanese meals. A colossal success, I must say.

In any event, this is probably the best personal experience from the products linked with the three words MADE IN CHINA, despite all those stories of tainted baby milk, recalled pet foods, oversulfated chondroitin sulfate contaminated heparin.

I'm not sure of the moral of my personal story, except that if you trust none of Chinese products it would be erroneous not to pay tribute to the Chinese cockroach bait.