Mar 02 (theguardian.com) - Japan’s state-run kyushoku system combines flavour with fresh ingredients and high nutritional value at low cost
The list of dishes reads like a health-conscious menu at an upmarket cafe: mackerel cooked in miso, a light salad of daikon radish and sour plum, thinly sliced pickled vegetables and a selection of fresh fruit. But the “restaurant†is actually a classroom at Konan primary school in central Japan, where the pupils need only the gentlest encouragement to eat their greens.
When the Guardian visited the school in the Pacific coastal city of Fukuroi, the classroom, momentarily transformed into a lunchtime cafeteria, reverberated to a chorus of “Itadakimasu†– a polite Japanese term for “let’s eatâ€.
On the menu today is baked cod, sautéed sweet corn and bok choy, minestrone soup, a small carton of milk and, as a Friday treat, a slightly less wholesome combination of white bread with a soy-based chocolate “cream†– a challenge to spread evenly on the bread with chopsticks.
The portions are modest, but then so is the total calorie count – 667 kcal for a meal that will sustain the 11-year-old children until they get home.
‘Something different every day’
Konan is not the only school in Japan producing a range of lunches – or kyushoku – that combine flavour with fresh ingredients and contain levels of iron, calcium and fibre stipulated by a government-run programme for children attending kindergarten through to the end of junior high school.
The kyushoku system was introduced in the 1950s to ensure that children did not have experience the dietary privations of the immediate postwar years. More than seven decades on, the programme is credited with contributing to Japan’s impressive life expectancy, and child and adult obesity levels that are among the lowest in the OECD group of nations.
