Natto!!!

I've been wanting to write a post about our school lunch for quite some time. So nearing the end of my journey now, I thought I'd better get onto it. Lunch at Junior high schools is quite a treat here in Japan. In elementary school (primary) and Junior high schools lunch is provided by the city of Ashikaga. It's not free but the amount we have to pay for it almost makes it free. It's about $2 a day ... pretty dirt cheap for the amount of food you get really. Lunch is set this way so that the students get a maximum balanced and healthy diet. Not a bad incentive considering the obesity rates of kids all over the world.

Anyway, lunch is delivered to the schools by lunch ladies and then the students have the task of dishing out the proportions to all the classmates in their home room. Over the last few years, they have implemented a system where ALT's (me) also have lunch with the students to help encourage them to communicate in English while eating. I rotate to a different class everyday. While I initially tried to strike conversation and really promote the speaking of English, it was like hitting your head against a brick wall sometimes. Lately I have stopped trying and just sat there and ate my lunch. There are certain kids, that will try to speak with me and that's cool when it happens.

The actual lunches them self can vary over the week. Some days the lunches are really good and others, they are really bad. There will be traditional Japanese lunches, Chinese types lunches and western type lunches. The western ones are when we have bread, pasta, frankfurts or hamburg (hamburger pattie drizzled in a sweet sauce). We get an outline of what we will be eating for the month. Initially, I could not read anything, so I had to quickly learned the kanji for beef, pork, beef and fish (which also helped me in the supermarkets). I can read most of the menu now but on days where I see lots of kanji and can't read it, then I know its a traditional Japanese lunch which involves fish and miso soup most of the time.

One particular Japanese lunch involves NATTO! Most Japanese love natto and eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I say most as even some Japanese can't eat it. Natto is basically fermented soybean ... yep, rotten soybean! The smell is pretty excruciating, especially when a whole classroom is mixing the stuff. The fermentation process gives the beans this sticky sappy texture, imagine any of those alien movies where after their insides are blown apart, there's that sappy thing going on. You need to mix the natto with soy and some mustard and then into your rice. I have tried it and so I am speaking from experience. I obviously did not like it. The Japanese keep telling me that it's really healthy for you. Think I'll stick to my fruit and veg!

Hey, but don't just take my word for it. I've prepared a little clip of me mixing up the natto for you all to see.

On occasions, they give us these little snack bags. This one contains little dried fish and wasabi peas ... mmm. They also come in little dried shrimp as well. Are these really any healthier than chips????

So the natto can come in little square polystyrene containers (not the most environmentally friendly), or little polystyrene cups.

Here's the contents inside with all the ingredients at the ready to start mixing. Natto however, is not hated by all foreigners, some of them actually like it. I've even heard stories of some of them eating it actually for breakfast, lunch and dinner when they are really poor. Wow!!!

Here's me showing you the natto phenomenom.

Natto is so uniquely Japanese and famous that it has also made it as a special challenge ingredient on Iron Chef! Watch the hilarious episode on youtube here (this is only 10mins of the episode, but you can find the rest of the episode on the youtube page).


The next couple of shots of some of the things served up for school lunch.

This is curry rice day. One of the few days I actually eat my whole tin of rice. I would struggle to get through it otherwise. It's Japanese curry, so not really hot, but does have veggies and either pork or chicken. You'll also find there's milk, which we have everyday. On this day we also got an egg and seaweed, corn and dikon (some root veggie) salad.

On this day we got some crumbed fish, miso soup, jelly, and some broccoli and cauliflower. Oh incidentally, another bad lunch day is pregnant fish day ... uuurrrggghhh!. It's a whole little fish, battered, crumbed and deep fried, head and all. I accidentally bit into one, one day and had a mouth full of fish eggs ... not great. I give these to my kids now ... they seem to love it!

On the left bowl here is some bacon and cabbage, in right bowl is what the Japanese call Oden. It's basically different vegetables and fish cake in a broth. They sell Oden in most 7 elevens in Japan, so it's basically big vats of hot water with stuff floating in them ... no covered ... Wow!

This would be a western style lunch, bread, frankfurt, little bit of cheese on the top, soup of some sort and a mandarine.

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While we're still on food, I thought I'd provide you with evidence as to how expensive fruit in Japan really is.

Here's a normal sized mango, price 398yen ... that's about $4 .... for one mango!!!

Cherries ... 398yen for about 25 cherries ... that works out to be about 15cents a cherry!!!

$4 for 1/6 of a slice of watermelon. Let's just say, I'll be happy to be buying fruit back home again.

On another note, still to do with food. I bought what I thought was a normal watermelon one week, when to my utter surprise ... the flesh was yellow when I cut into it!!!!

I've never had a yellow watermelon before and didn't even know they existed ... until now!

Anyway, I tried it ... and if you closed your eyes and not looked at the colour, then you'd think that you were eating a normal watermelon. The texture is the same but it wasn't as sweet as a red watermelon.