Erk
6th December, 2007, 04:02 AM
Every day, every student in the Natori school district is provided with a school lunch called "kyuushoku". This was once translated engrishly by one of my students as "provision of meal". Literally, I think one could call it "assigned lunch" or "ration lunch". Of course, the meaning is "school lunch".
Studying the school lunch and the way kids talk about it has revealed to me some interesting stuff about how Japanese people think of food.
Before I go into detail, I should describe how I think of meals - or at least how I was brought up to. In our family, a meal was generally split into "protein", "starch", and "vegetable". Usually that means something like chicken, rice, and carrots, or pork chops, mashed potatoes and a salad. There were many variations on this theme and many meals that strayed wholly from it, but that was the core idea. If asked what I had for dinner, even now, I'd respond with the protein first and then maybe list the others.
In Japan, the main dish is called, eloquently enough, the shushoku (主食) - "main dish" or "staple dish". With the school lunches, we alternate daily between either a rice or bread shushoku. This is the first big difference: if you ask a Japanese person what they had for lunch, they'll often answer simply "rice" or "bread". I suspect this is part of where the myth that Japanese people eat nothing but rice came from. Likewise, I suspect the counterpart - that Westerners will often answer "chicken" instead - has a bit of influence on our reputation here as dedicated meateaters.
Besides the staple, the other "mandatory" element to a japanese meal is the shirumono (汁物), the soup. Considering a soup to be more or less indispensable to the meal is something that might seem a bit odd to foreigners like me, but that's just the way they roll in these parts. Typically the shirumono is miso-based, but there are others. In today's school lunch, the shiromono is actually an udon noodle soup.
Shirumono and shushoku can combine their powers to become... BREAKFAST. The traditional modern Japanese breakfast is a bowl of rice and a bowl of miso soup.
The next element of a larger balanced meal is the shusai (主菜), literally the "main ingredient" or "main side dish". This is often a protein, but by no means always. I can't really find any uniting factor for what defines the shusai except the size of the main element. Shusai generally seems to be a single large chunk or a few large chunks of something, be it tempura squash, a couple gyoza, or a piece of chicken.
Finally, the school lunches also include a fukusai (副菜), "secondary ingredient" or "lesser side dish". Like the shusai, this seems defined mostly by its size: fukusai is usually made up of a lot of small bits and pieces. For example, today's was a sautee of corn and hot dog weiners. Yumm. Other school fukusai include japanese-style pickles (tsukemono), seaweed salad, soybean and corn sautee or salad, and a wide variety of other dishes.
Bottom line: the Japanese like to have more dishes in their meals than they do, for one thing. For another, they divide their dishes more by texture than by food group. That, as they say, is food for thought.
Studying the school lunch and the way kids talk about it has revealed to me some interesting stuff about how Japanese people think of food.
Before I go into detail, I should describe how I think of meals - or at least how I was brought up to. In our family, a meal was generally split into "protein", "starch", and "vegetable". Usually that means something like chicken, rice, and carrots, or pork chops, mashed potatoes and a salad. There were many variations on this theme and many meals that strayed wholly from it, but that was the core idea. If asked what I had for dinner, even now, I'd respond with the protein first and then maybe list the others.
In Japan, the main dish is called, eloquently enough, the shushoku (主食) - "main dish" or "staple dish". With the school lunches, we alternate daily between either a rice or bread shushoku. This is the first big difference: if you ask a Japanese person what they had for lunch, they'll often answer simply "rice" or "bread". I suspect this is part of where the myth that Japanese people eat nothing but rice came from. Likewise, I suspect the counterpart - that Westerners will often answer "chicken" instead - has a bit of influence on our reputation here as dedicated meateaters.
Besides the staple, the other "mandatory" element to a japanese meal is the shirumono (汁物), the soup. Considering a soup to be more or less indispensable to the meal is something that might seem a bit odd to foreigners like me, but that's just the way they roll in these parts. Typically the shirumono is miso-based, but there are others. In today's school lunch, the shiromono is actually an udon noodle soup.
Shirumono and shushoku can combine their powers to become... BREAKFAST. The traditional modern Japanese breakfast is a bowl of rice and a bowl of miso soup.
The next element of a larger balanced meal is the shusai (主菜), literally the "main ingredient" or "main side dish". This is often a protein, but by no means always. I can't really find any uniting factor for what defines the shusai except the size of the main element. Shusai generally seems to be a single large chunk or a few large chunks of something, be it tempura squash, a couple gyoza, or a piece of chicken.
Finally, the school lunches also include a fukusai (副菜), "secondary ingredient" or "lesser side dish". Like the shusai, this seems defined mostly by its size: fukusai is usually made up of a lot of small bits and pieces. For example, today's was a sautee of corn and hot dog weiners. Yumm. Other school fukusai include japanese-style pickles (tsukemono), seaweed salad, soybean and corn sautee or salad, and a wide variety of other dishes.
Bottom line: the Japanese like to have more dishes in their meals than they do, for one thing. For another, they divide their dishes more by texture than by food group. That, as they say, is food for thought.