Oishii desu

There are about a thousand different reasons why I'm a lucky guy. The one I'd like to talk about today is school lunch. The reason I'm lucky is because after 4 months of eating the same food that is also served to the students and other teachers I have yet to walk away hungry or disappointed. Some of my peers in the other realms of Matsue BOE are at the mercy of some other kitchen. Shinji Chugako's food come from a building about halfway between my school and my apartment.

The way school lunch works is this. About an hour before the lunch hour, a truck arrives with four rolling stainless steel cabinets filled with the days food and eating utensils. They lower these behemoths off the truck and lock them away in a little room. After 4th period, 4-5 students from each class, don their white smocks and face masks and trot on down to the storage area.

By this time one or two of the teachers have unlocked the room and wait as the students come down and pick up the 4-5 stainless steal containers with the days food. Regularly, there is a soup bucket, a rice bin, two other bins filled with the days food selection and a wire basket with trays, bowls, plates and chopsticks. Oh, and a 500ml glass jar of really good milk.

The students then take the food to their classrooms. Remember that here in junior high, the students stay in the same room and the teachers move around from period to period, so their homeroom is where they spend most of everyday. They then fold out two long tables that each room has and set up chow line where the selected students for the day dish out equal portions of the days selection. At the same time, 2-3 of the teachers are also doing this for the rest of the teaching staff that aren't homeroom teachers. They eat with their students.

After all is said and eaten, everything is packed up. Any kind of "trash" is combined in like groups and consolidated for later recycling elsewhere. The recycling program in this country is amazing. Then one by one, the students bring back the empty containers, put them back in the cabinets and the storage room is locked up.

From the first lunch bell to the last 40 minutes will have expired, 270 students and 25 teachers will have been fed and beside the slight smell of food in the air you almost would never be able to guess if you were to witness the place before and after.

Now the lunch itself is not only really healthy but tastes damn good as far as I'm concerned. Besides the random cubes of tofu that end up in my soup bowl 2-3 times a month, its really quite a fantastic meal. When I was in junior high I had at least 7 different choices of theme lines like the hamburger grill, Mexican, junk/snack food, the regular cafeteria menu and, as many of my friends back in the day frequented, the vending machines.

Had you taken me and my peers back then, as well as my teachers, and told us we were all to eat the same healthy meal with no choices for other foods.....I think the building would have been burnt to the ground. Its amazing to think about as well because if you look at the kids today in the states, which I did last time I was there, they are huge. And no wonder, look at the crap they are being allowed to eat! I give big credit to my dad who made josh, kate and i eat veggies every night during dinners at the house. I actually remember him and mom harping on us to eat balanced meals.

Long story short, today's lunch was really, really good. Oishii desu means "It's delicious." The boys in the picture are playing junken (paper, rock, scissors) for the last yogurt.

As soon as I can get some more pictures I'm gonna include them in this story, but for the moment I'm just going to post this because it really has been a while since I did anything with this blog.

As an interesting side note, I've read that acne is becoming an ever increasing problem here. No one really knows why but it never was a problem among the youth until after "fast food" and "junk food" became popular and cool.