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Country Watch: Japan
By Deborah Lehmann —
This is the first post in a series that will examine school meals across the globe. We’ll start off with Japan, where school lunch is considered an important part of public education.
Japanese schoolchildren eat lunch in the classroom, and students take turns serving the meal and cleaning up afterward. Their teacher eats the same food with them — typically rice, soup, fish and milk — and pays close attention to manners. Virtually all students eat the school lunch, as they’re usually not allowed to bring their own food.
Lunch in Japanese schools is part of the curriculum just like math or science. The midday meal is meant to improve student health, but also to “foster correct eating habits and good human relations,” according to the Ministry of Education. Schools send home a monthly menu that outlines the nutritional value of each meal, lists the ingredients and discusses the benefits of the foods served, many of which are locally grown and produced.
Alice Gordenker, an American with two children in Japanese public elementary school, writes that Japanese parents view school lunch as “an integral part of their children’s education.” A couple of years ago, the school authorities in her Tokyo ward looked into outsourcing school meals to a private company to save money. The cost of producing a meal is about 2,500 yen (labor is expensive), and families pay only 250 yen per meal, with the school district covering the rest. Though outsourcing lunch preparation would have saved the ward millions of yen, about half the parents in the district were opposed to the change. At a meeting for community members, one mother shook her head and said, “I can’t believe that a part-time worker is going to put love and care into cooking for my daughter.”
Gordenker recalls her low expectations of American school meals, remembering how she packed lunch for her kids because she didn’t want them eating the hamburgers and hotdogs offered in the cafeteria. Not so for families in Japan. School lunch isn’t just “a feeding program to fill kids’ tummies,” she writes. “Parents expect the school lunch to provide children with a variety of wholesome foods so they learn about nutrition and how to make wise food choices.”
Flickr has an impressive number of pictures of Japanese school lunches. Check them out here.
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