Chinese Commercialism Sends Mooncake Prices Into Orbit By Ralph Frammolino
Through advertising, slick packaging and a stunning array of new flavors, the traditional holiday dessert has been transformed into a modern-day status symbol.
And now the Chinese, to whom gift giving is a serious exercise in social etiquette, find themselves locked in a virtual mooncake arms race as they do their last-minute shopping for the pastries to give to friends, families and colleagues in time for tonight's annual moon festival dinner.
People are
cranking out mooncakes with increasingly exotic fillings — shark fin, mussels, crushed eggshells, salted beef soaked in liquor, abalone, even bits of swallows' nests.
There are sugar-free mooncakes, whole-grain mooncakes and Atkins diet mooncakes. There are Dove bar mooncakes and Haagen-Dazs mooncakes. For the metallurgically inclined, there's even the ornamental 9.5-gram mooncake made of gold, costing $225.
And that's only the half of it. Mooncakes now come packaged in individual boxes of carved jade or hand-polished wood. They are paired with expensive wines, fine porcelain tea sets, CDs — even cameras — in sets fetching as much as $1,210.
Yeah, I can live without the typical kind, but I have had some that weren't bad.
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