給食 "School lunch"

A post devoted to the sometimes delicious, sometimes mysterious kyuushoku.

As a kid going to public school in Winnipeg, I always brown bagged it. Well, for a while, in elementary school it was a really sweet Empire Strikes Back tin lunch box with matching thermos but I digress. My Dad always packed me a lunch. Now that I'm a grown up, I like to pack my own lunch. However, if you want to spend time with the kids, you must eat like everyone else and take part in school lunches.



There are 5 (sometimes 6) parts to each school lunch:

1) Beverage: usually milk. Quite creamy milk. Creamier than 2% milk. Occasionally a yogurt drink with a fruity taste.

2) Soup: either miso or soy-sauce based. Filled with any combination of mushrooms, cabbage, tofu, carrots, beans, egg, noodles, meat or other. 

Unless it's a curry-Friday. 

3) Meat: this has a decent amount of variety, sometimes it's a sweet egg omelette, sometimes it's a "Japanese hamburger" (ground beef and port patty in a miso sauce), it can be fish, chicken or battered and fried shrimp or tofu. It seems most often that the meats are fried, but sometimes they are boiled or grilled.

Sliiiiiiiiimy veggies.

4) "Vegetables": usually a mix of chopped up veggies boiled to perfection and mixed in a sauce. The Japanese seem to have something against raw vegetables. This can also be potato salad, egg salad or slimy-ochra-infused-mush. "Why the quotation marks?" you ask? Because more often than there is meat or fish in the mix.

Unless it's a curry-Friday. 

Then, it's usually a yogurt-and-cream-cheese-with-fruit-cocktail sweet treat.

Bag-O-Bread with blueberry jam and
pat-o-butter on top, cheese omelette,
 potato salad with beef stew.

5) Carbohydrate: I'm sure you can figger out what's involved in this. That's right, it's Bowl-O-Rice. Most of the time it's just straight up white rice. Sometimes it's fried rice with shrimp and a couple of peas or something. Before I started putting it back and asking for smaller portions, I think it was about 3 cups of rice every lunch. Now, don't get me wrong, I do enjoy rice, but I come from a place that has a lot of options when it comes to grains. I was pretty excited when I found brown rice at the farmer's market lemmietellya. To mix things up a little, it's sometimes bread, either a couple of slices or a small loaf sealed in a plastic bag. 

6) Dessert! Occasionally on holidays such as Halloween or Valentines day, there's a special treat of not-quite-thawed-jello or pudding. Sometimes a cookie. Sometimes omiyage (souvenir treat) from students if they went on a class trip or something.

Sometimes there are other little add-ons, like a ketchup/mustard squeeze pack when there are sausages ('hot dogs) involved, little packets of nori and salt to put on top of rice, sauces (sometimes soy, sometimes other) for the breaded and fried patties.

Holiday meals can have a colour scheme. For instance, Halloween had egg salad and orange pudding, the tofu patty was dyed yellow, orange yogurt drink and yellow rice. Valentines day had heart-shaped and red or pink foods.

Wee! Spaghetti! I don't remember
what the breaded meat was...

"pizza" roll, which was a deep fried
 egg-roll with cheese and
tomato sauce inside. Goes well with
cream based potato soup, ne?

Spork!Spork!Spork!

Everyone brings their own set of chopsticks to use, however there are times when the meal cannot be consumed with chopsticks, so we are provided with everyone's favorite utensil... A SPORK. I still can't understand the logic behind having to use chopsticks or a spork to try and cut through a dried out fried-and- breaded-something-or-other, but what the hell do I know?
Based upon the info provided on the monthly kyuushoku menu posted in various places in schools, elementary school lunches are about 650 calories and junior high school lunches are 860 calories.

!!!

That's right.
860 calories.

I try to keep my normal daily intake at 1200 calories.

I didn't notice this at first and was trying to be a good example and clean my plate. I still clean my plate at elementary school, but not until after I have either divvied most of my rice and some of my soup among the other teacher's trays or put them back in the serving containers so another person can eat it if they so choose. I'm not a big milk drinker (I eat a lot of yogurt and get 'fat free' milk at the supermarket, my bones are just fine), so I either give my milk to one of my students or use it for coffee or tea in the office. I think I have adjusted things enough so that I am consuming more like, 250-300 calories at lunch and have a morning and afternoon snack (like, an apple or raisins and cheerios that Lianne sent me) to keep me from going into the notorious 'carb-coma' my students and fellow ALTs lapse into after eating so much.