The Most Important Meal
Submitted by Suzu on Thu, 06/09/2016 - 16:51
Lunch: the most important meal - and class
When you ask a child going to school what their favorite class is, some may say chemistry, some may like art, but let’s be real: everybody loves lunch time. Who doesn’t love lunch?
As a Japanese-American, born and raised in New York, I had the pleasure of visiting family in Japan from time to time. My mother is from a small fishing town called Kesennuma of Miyagi Prefecture, one of the places destroyed by the tsunami in 2011. Before the scenery of the whole city changed, I would spend my summers at my grandmother’s house in this peaceful, quiet town.
During my stay, I was able to temporarily enroll in the local elementary school, as this is something many Japanese children abroad do frequently, so the children could experience what Japanese schooling is like and keep in touch with their Japanese roots. Every summer I attended school, I never missed a single day of classes because I was far too excited to miss the best class known as lunch.
Now, some may disagree and say lunch isn’t a class, and I partially agree. At the public schools I attended in New York, I would go to the cafeteria, line up in the lunch line, receive some mystery chicken nuggets, soggy peas, and chocolate milk, served on a plastic tray, and after I have a small bite from one of the nuggets and give away my sugar drenched chocolate milk, I would go out for recess outside. Lunch in America felt like time for students to just feed themselves and relax from school and socialize. There might not be anything necessarily wrong with that, but the experience I had at elementary schools in Japan made me feel how inefficient American school lunches are in many ways. I would definitely consider lunch time in Japan a class, and an extremely important one that I still reflect on til this day.
給食当番 (kyuushoku touban)
Every Japanese elementary school has a very similar routine. For every class, each student is in a group, and every week, a new task is assigned to your group. If your group is the 給食当番 (kyuushoku touban), you are in charge of lunch. As the bell rings at noon, the 給食当番 puts on their serving apron, mask, and a hat, while the rest of the class moves the desks around and such to get ready to eat.
The 給食当番 goes to the school kitchen, where they receive that day’s lunch, trays, serving utensils, milk, and such. As they receive the food from the lunch ladies (or gentlemen), they are taught to say thank you and bow to them. Those who serve lunch are certified nutritionists, and cook up large quantities of nutritionally calculated meal every day for the students.
After the 給食当番 returns to the classroom from the kitchen, they line the food up in the front and the rest of the class, including the teacher, line up and each person is served lunch.
Similar but Different Japanese School Lunches
Generally, lunch consists of either bread or rice, some sort of soup, a main dish, a side dish, and milk, with some sort of dessert.
After everybody is served, the 給食当番 could make any special announcements about the food, such as where their vegetables came from, like the school garden or a local farm, or if a dish has a special meaning. For example, Kesennuma is known for their shark fin cuisine. Though it is an expensive delicacy, about once a year, shark fin soup is served to the students, which was accompanied with a field trip to the fish market or have a guest speaker to explain the production and the importance of the product in the Kesennuma economy.
After announcements, the rest of the class will say their thanks, bow to the 給食当番 for serving them food, and once everybody returns to their seat, they all say my favorite phrase: いただきます！(itadakimasu) and eat.
After their meal, the students collectively say ごちそうさまでした (gochizousama deshita), and any leftovers are placed in one tray, and the 給食当番 brings back down all the utensils and such to the kitchen, and returns back to the class to brush their teeth with their classmates. After they have cleaned and moved their desks back into place, the class would be dismissed for recess.
This whole lunch time seems like quite a process, especially compared to how my school lunch was in America. But without a doubt, Japanese elementary school lunches were much, much more superior than American lunches, in my opinion, in so many levels.
One obvious dissatisfaction I have with American school lunches is it’s quality; I can’t understand how feeding heated frozen pizza, rubbery chicken nuggets doused in ketchup, or overcooked brown rice to children is a supposed to be considered a good, or even a solid lunch. It’s definitely neither healthy nor nutritional, and it wasn’t even a bit tasty. Meanwhile, in Japan, I was able to eat a delicious, home (or school) cooked meal everyday, and my parents paid roughly the same cost. Growing up with my foodie parents, I was blessed and pampered with my mom’s exceptional cooking skills, and perhaps that was the reason why I could never finish my school lunches in America, unless my mom prepared me lunch that day. I wasn’t the only one not eating their lunch, and everybody would throw out their half eaten pizzas and their plastic trays into the trash can until it overflowed, everyday. Now that I look back at it, it was wasteful, and it’s something that I would hate doing now. But because it was something everybody did, and because no one at school would tell me the impact of wasting, I didn’t feel bad about it.
In Japan, however, I would always eat every last grain of rice at my Japanese school, simply because the food was actually appetizing. There are students who have dislikes and such, and obviously, people can’t always finish their food. Teachers ultimately cannot force their students to finish everything, however teachers strongly encourages the students to finish their meal and discourages wasting. If a student consistently doesn’t eat a significant portion of their lunches, the teacher may have a talk with the student. But incorporating the fact that Japanese schools usually use reusable trays and utensils, the waste created by school lunches in Japan is significantly less than that of America.
Recycling
Which brings me to the next point: recycling. All I remember in my American elementary school about recycling is how there was a recycling bin for paper in every classroom and just that. Years later, I learned that they end up dumping the “recycled” paper into the same dumpster. In Japan, though for the most part everything is reusable, there are some things that couldn’t be reused, such as the milk container. For this, we were taught how to properly fold the milk cartons, organize them, and put them away to recycle as so:
I understand that doing little things like this may be annoying and time consuming, but I think makes a point to the students. I can’t say that everybody who did this in Japan is a waste-free, perfect human being, but it exposes the students to be conscious about the trash and waste they’re producing, and the importance of recycling, which is something I personally never experienced in America.
Ultimately, the one thing I really value from the Japanese lunch time is appreciation. This includes the appreciation in the food itself, appreciation for the people that took the time to make a well balanced and nutritional meal, and appreciation for the people that served the food. Though saying our thank you's and bowing was something we were forced to do, how our food is prepared is something that we often take for granted, and we should rightfully say our thank you's. Cooking is a chore; if no one is there to cook for you, you have to cook on your own, and if you can’t cook, you’re stuck with probably not so good food. How you obtain your food requires a lot of work - growing the vegetables, catching the fish, raising the meat, and how it has to travel to get to you; a lot of work goes into what you eat. Though it’s not always visible, without the work of a lot of people and resources, you wouldn’t be eating the food you’re eating right now, and I think it’s something that we should recognize and appreciate more.
Perhaps not everyone in Japan got the same thing I got out of lunch time, but nonetheless, it impacted me enough to give me this perspective. Many times, I feel like in the world in general but especially America is plagued with over-consumption and instant satisfaction, which we take for granted. I can’t say that school lunches will solve everything, but incorporating elements from what I experienced in Japan can definitely be a step towards a better future, and better food for all.
If you find this interesting, I suggest watching the movie School Days with a Pig
- Suzu's blog
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