SCHOOL LUNCHES

WaPo recently ran what amounted to a love letter to school lunches in Japan.  The highlights: Japanese kids eat some of the most nutritious and best lunches in the world!  Obesity levels are remarkably low in Japanese child and adolescent populations! Parents even seek out recipes to duplicate at home!  And most importantly: if you or your child are not eating Japanese school lunches daily, you should go cry in a corner, because you're probably going to get fat and die young.  Or at least younger than a Japanese person, who will live on average 83 years.  

I should preface this by saying that I have never eaten kyushoku, or school lunch.  Kyushoku ends after junior high school, along with compulsory school attendance.  However, some Japanese people express nostalgia over school lunches, particularly baby boomers, for whom kyoshoku was perhaps their one substantive meal of the day.**  It's also not uncommon to see JETs post photos of their food on Facebook, or giddy status updates like, "OMG it's curry day so excited!!!"  Still, not every meal is a hit, and there is the occasional complaint.  One JET who read the WaPo article posted, "Hey WaPo, my Japanese JHS students hate school lunch and complain about it every day. They'd all rather eat the bento mom will make them every morning."  

Yet some schools, particularly primary schools, ban home lunches.  Bento making has approached an art form, and thousands of websites offer tips on how to make food more aesthetically pleasing.  Of particular importance is how cute the lunch is, and there can be hurt feelings, particularly among elementary school students, if their lunches are not as kawaii as their friends'.  Oh how far we've come from the days (at least in my generation) where kids would proudly flaunt their processed Lunchables snack packs as proof of their mothers' superior love and care.  Now mothers are spending hours upon hours prepping ingredients, cutting foods into shapes, and artistically arranging them for consumption.  

My high schoolers either bring their lunch or buy bread and sugary drinks from the school store.  Teachers can order bentos from an offsite provider; however, this is no a la carte service.  Everyone gets the same lunch.  You want dressing on the side? Too bad. 

Complete with a fried egg in the shape of a heart.

Lotus root (bottom left) is particularly delicious. 

As a foreigner, my lunch is often scrutinized.  Students want to know what I'm eating,  and sometimes even ask for a taste.  The teachers want to know if I prepare my lunch or buy it.  The other day I brought leftover Mexican food (many thanks to my aunt and uncle for sending me the supplies), and one of the male teachers stopped to hover over my shoulder.  After several minutes, I heard him ask the young Japanese teacher near me, "What is that?" Luckily, she had a ready answer, since she had asked me the same question the day before. "Oh," she replied softly, "I think they are...tacos?"  

**Many people think with particular fondness about the days when whale was served.  After the world wars, when Japan was strapped for resources, whale provided a relatively cheap and plentiful source of protein.  Whaling has caused a furor in some western countries, who regard the industry as barbaric.  Older generations of Japanese respond to this censure with indignation; their attitude seems to be, "We did what we had to do, and we ate what we had to eat." Demand for whale seems to be falling nowadays, however, and I've never heard of anyone being served whale at school.  For a more in depth look at whaling, here's an article by journalist Jake Adelstein.  More soon on him and his fascinating book covering the Tokyo police beat in the 1990s.  

LIFE WITH RINO

LAL directed me to a series of YouTube videos titled, "Rino which eats world various dishes." The premise is simple: Rino is about 4 years old, and her mom makes rather elaborate international dinners, which she then feeds to Rino and films her (exuberant) reaction.  If that wasn't adorable enough, her infant brother occasionally makes cameos as well.  

I have to say, I want to hang out with Rino; she's adventurous and she can really eat, which are qualities I look for in my friends.  Her table manners we can work on; she's not even 5, after all.  Plus, her mom is a great cook (watch her flip this giant okonomiyaki, which has natto in it. Props to Rino for eating anything with natto in it)! 

Rino gives me hope in a world of picky eaters, where some kids pass the first 10 years of their lives consuming little more than chocolate milk, and some adults have never eaten something as commonplace as a banana (seriously, I dated someone like that in college).  There's a whole delicious world out there, and Rino's gobbling it up...literally.  Ganbare!