Bag of chips

When my wife came back from Cambodia recently, she brought back the usual souvenirs. T-shirts, keychains, fridge magnets, trinkets and lots of photographs. But there was this bag of jackfruit chips that I thought was very unusual for her.


"Why this bag of chips?" I asked her.

"Don't know," she said, "I saw colleagues buying them so I bought one too, lah!"

I can't question that kind of logic.

But never mind. My wife, who always has a keen eye for industries and industrial development wherever she goes, remarked that Cambodia was almost devoid of any industry. "As far as I could see, there was no development all the way from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap," she said. Her entourage was travelling by bus on an eight-hour long journey to meet up with her other office colleagues who had travelled directly from Kuala Lumpur to Siem Reap. I had urged her to follow her other group of colleagues to the Cambodian capital so that she could see more of the country.

So back to the bag of jackfruit chips.

In between mouths-ful, I mentioned that despite the absence of industrial development, there must surely be some cottage industry there or else the country wouldn't have been able to produce such a nice packaging. It looked very professionally done. I turned it around. "See? There's even a bar code."

But then, after the bag had been emptied by us, I noticed this little mark at the bottom of the package:


See where it was made? Now I understand.