Mr Ferguson’s Classroom

Today I thought I’d share a couple of foods I have a little trouble eating. Above is a nice soup with pork, sweet potato, radish, tofu, carrot, green onions and burdock. To the left is spinach with bean sprouts and bonito flakes. Also, to the left, however, are two small fish, whose bellies are filled with eggs, and are eaten whole. The taste is pretty strong and lingers in your mouth a bit too long for my liking. One child last year used to say that she loved it when I ate with them on this menu day because she knew she’d get an extra fish. Recently I’ve learned to eat them, but I wouldn’t say enjoy them.

Next is actually a child’s meal with a similar soup, rice, oranges, and natto, arguably the strangest of Japanese foods. You can smell that natto is on the menu before you can read about it, as it has a pungency that fills the room. I can manage the smell better than the texture, which is like slime (I think of Ghostbusters, which is perhaps where the difficulty in eating it lies). Everyone whisks their chopsticks around after picking up some natto to break the strings of goo before they eat it. It’s something I need to be in a really good mood to eat. People talk about it like it’s something that you grow up on, perhaps like Australians and vegemite, and people have turned their noses when I’ve told them about eating black eyed peas and grits, so I concede that everyone is entitled to their own tastes. While I’ve tried natto several times, I usually share generously with the children at my table.

On this day, however, the school director, who lives next door to the school, prepared an alternative lunch for me, a whole fish and bamboo shoots, freshly picked this month, pictured on the left plate. I wish I could have taken a nap with the kids after finishing this one. Oishii=delicious.

After reading a couple books in English about making sandwiches and soups with my 5-year-olds in March, the teachers helped me organize a cooking lesson. Pictured below are children making soup from a recipe we wrote in English. This was the last lesson I had with these children before they graduated at the end of March.

This was a chicken and vegetable soup with carrots, onion, cabbage potatoes and mushroom. It was tamer than other groups, who included eggplant, corn, seaweed, and/or tomato. The recipes were written in a democratic fashion, asking the children what they thought should go in a yummy soup, and letting them vote on the final ingredients. They were also based on a contestable theory that just about any fresh vegetables, with the help of a bullion cube, will make a tasty soup.

This recipe turned out to be successful, as children, by chopstick, ate all of it. Of course, the real fun was in the preparation. The children helped cut all of the vegetables, and consulted the recipe written in English on large chart paper. These kids really made our English lessons fun, always being inquisitive about books and activities during lesson. They were a joy to work with, and I’m glad we could end with sharing food.

Apologies for a hiatus in posting. In Japan, the new school year begins in April, so in the past few weeks I have said goodbye to my graduating 5-year-olds, who I have taught longer than any other group of kids here, and started new classes. I have less than three months with them before I go home, which makes every bit of time more and more precious. There is a ton I’d like to get written down, though, for memory sake.

April also came with the blooming of the sakura (cherry blossoms), one of the more infamous marks of the season in Japan. Two of my nursery schools have large sakura trees that tower over the playgrounds. The tradition is to have a hanami, basically a picnic under the trees once they are in full bloom, which all schools participated in with their children.

At night the trees are illuminated, similar to a christmas tree. At this particular school, a hanami was planned just for the teachers after work.
I don’t think I can name everything we had to eat in our bento’s, but it included (from the top left going clockwise) a salad, orange, shrimp tempura, two types of cooked white fish, sashimi (I had fish and octopus on the right, and squid not pictured), broccoli and tomato, mame and strawberry, more octopus and wasabi, tamagoyaki (cooked egg), rice and an ume boshi (fermented plum).

Both the strawberry and orange were served because they are in season now, and I’m sure other foods that I’m less familiar with were chosen for the same reason. It was a celebration of spring, one of the most pleasant times to be in Japan.

Above are two lunches from last week. At the top is Japanese curry with beef, onions, potatoes, carrots, and peas, served with rice, banana, and a mixture of apple, cabbage and vinegar. The next picture is fried chicken cooked with potatoes, green peppers and onions, served with rice and a mixture of cooked carrots, cucumbers, hijiki (seaweed) and dried daikon.

A few of the comments I received from my post on Mrs. Q’s blog asked if I were only showing the best of lunches. The answer is yes, so today I wanted to share two that I felt were not the healthiest. I do occasionally eat fried food at school. One of my favorite lunches here is fried fish, which I get maybe once a month at one school. The cook teacher takes whole pieces of fish, batters and fries them herself.

The lunches above were also made from scratch. Another interesting note is that daikon is often served with fried foods in Japan because it helps settle your stomach from the excess oil (this is why daikon is served with tempura). As long as they are served occasionally, fried foods, like the fish or chicken handmade from real ingredients, still seem healthier than a fish stick or chicken nugget.

Mrs. Q has graciously posted a story I wrote about the lunch I ate for hina matsuri, a holiday we recently celebrated in Japan. Her blog is truly inspiring, so I hope anyone reading will visit her site and show her some support.

As for this week, on Monday I had this for lunch:

Salmon, spinach with sesame seeds, and a mixture of daikon radishes, carrots, and tofu. Banana and rice as well.

This is what I had for snack:

Orange slices, and a pastry that I learned comes from Okinawa, but our new cook teacher made herself. Oishii (delicious)!

This week I’m getting to do some cooking lessons in English, so I hope to post photos of that next week. Thanks to all the new readers leaving comments.

As it snowed for the first time this year, we had this for lunch:

On the left, cooked pork, carrots, potatoes, onions, french beans, and konyaku (also known as devil’s tongue).

On the right, an aemono with a kind of spinach, carrots, cooked tofu, and sesame seeds.

In the back, rice, a banana, and apple wedges (The Japanese teachers were shocked when I said that fruit is often given to children at home whole, like a whole apple or orange, not cut).

The past couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about food in English lesson. This week we made this chart of foods we liked and disliked. I did this last year and found their responses pretty interesting. I think the question is a little difficult to answer for some of them, as if they don’t often think often food in these terms. Often a trend grows out of the children’s responses, as if their answer is more related to the previous person’s response than their own true feeling (I mentioned that pineapple was a yum food for me and then it appeared three times on the chart).

I was surprised last year when many children chose green pepper as a food they disliked, and coincidentally that day we had green pepper in our lunch and everyone ate it without hesitation. We then made pizzas in our lesson, and one group chose green pepper as one of their toppings. I asked them why and they weren’t sure. Their teacher said that pizzas often come with green pepper on them, so it probably just seems natural for them to be on a pizza.

This raises an interesting issue about the ways in which we value food. I remember when I was a debate coach, a late night after finishing a tournament and our team hadn’t eaten dinner yet. A Burger King near the hotel seemed to be our best option, and I asked everyone just to choose something that didn’t require a special order, without pickles, etc., so we could get back as quickly as possible. That led to a series of arguments, one which ended when a student said to me, “Why would I get something if I don’t like it?”.

I then realized, to that student, food was exclusively a matter of taste. Food, however, can be eaten, valued, and enjoyed for many different reasons: because it’s healthy, because someone you care about made it, or grew it, and served it to you, because it’s a new cultural experience, because it will go to waste otherwise, because you’re hungry. These values have to come from somewhere, most likely home, but schools can certainly instill them too.

At our nursery schools all food is eaten as a rule (I know after being called out on leaving some corn kernels in my bowl once). If a child doesn’t like something, they are simply taught how to eat it anyway. For example, they might say, “could you just try a little just for me?” or “it will make you strong”. Once I saw a teacher talking with a new student who didn’t like the fish we had for lunch. She looked at his plate, nothing left but the fish and a banana, so she said, “Do you like banana?” He said yes, and she said “how about eating the fish and the banana together, and see how that tastes?” He said it was good.

When my elementary kids in America threw away their food, I couldn’t blame them. I think the teachers here are better supported to teach these values when the food is actually healthy, fresh, and carefully prepared and served.

Thanks for the comments from new visitors.

At Midori Hoikuen, the lunch menu is written by a student as a daily classroom chore, then read to class before everyone eats. Unfortunately, even after it was explained to me, the best I can translate is that it’s a little technical, except for the bottom line which reads みかん, mican, meaning orange.

Today’s lunch was nishime, vegetables boiled in water and soy sauce. At the bottom left is lotus root, carrots, french beans, and chikuwa, made from fish. The bottom right is koyadofu, a kind of tofu. Top right is a spinach steamed with bonito flakes (fish, but tastes salty like ham). Top left is potatoes boiled in soy sauce in water. Rice, oranges (locally in season right now), a banana and tea.

I’m happy some new visitors found my pictures last week. To answer some questions left in comments:

The children in the nursery school have recess about three times a day, which doesn’t include group game activities like dodgeball, kick the can, relays, walks or swimming in the summer. Each classroom door leads to an open air hallway and then the children are outside. The doors and windows are open, even in winter if it’s not too cold.

On preparation, usually two cook teachers, as they are respectfully called, prepare the 70-80 lunches for the students and teachers in the school. I see them cutting vegetables when I arrive around 9, and finishing up around 4 or 5, after they’ve prepared snack, which is also usually handmade. They also buy food directly from grocery suppliers, but follow food guidelines determined by the prefectural government.

Thanks for the comments.

I’ve recently been inspired by two vocal advocates for healthy lunches and better food/cooking education for school children. The first is Jamie Oliver, who is using his recent TED Prize award to fight obesity in America.

The second is a teacher anonymously blogging as she eats her school’s lunch every day in 2010.

One of the most stressful times for me as a teacher in America was lunch time, of all times when I needed peace the most.  I hated it because everyday my children got packets of sauce or dressing to slather on their food, which I had to open because their 5 year old hands were too small. I hated cleaning it off of them when they tried to open it by themselves, thinking that nothing about their lunch was made with children in mind. I hated being rushed, often not even finishing my own lunch. And I hated watching trays, plastic cutlery, napkins, milk cartons, and unwanted food thrown away, sometimes twice a day.

I hated that children were given food completely removed from a source and provider, and taught that that everything in the lunchroom is disposable. So when I moved to Japan, I immediately noticed the differences in the hoikuen (nursery school) lunch experience. I noticed table cloths, real plates, cups and utensils, children serving each other in their own classrooms, the secular blessing “Itadakimasu” said always before a meal, eating broccoli and finishing it, and rice, fresh fruit, and tea every day. The only frozen food I’ve eaten at lunch here is a frozen orange served as a dessert.

I respect what the anonymous teacher is advocating for so much, so I’d like to start posting one of my school lunches every week as sort of an international counterpoint to her school’s lunch program. I am not trying to suggest that the hoikuen lunch is perfect, nor best for American school lunch programs, nor that there aren’t American lunch programs much better than mine. However, for a little perspective, I want to share one way that children are fed in one school, in another country. The children’s lunches are just like my pictures only with smaller portion sizes. So for today’s lunch, I ate:

Tuna salad made with noodles, carrots, cucumbers, homemade, tofu burgers with green onions (I forgot to ask what else), broccoli, miso soup with konbu seaweed, mushrooms, green onions, and daikon radish, rice, and strawberries.

When I returned to Japan from Christmas vacation, this was my first school lunch:

Baked salmon, aemono (cold vegetable dish) with spinach, tofu, carrots, konyaku, persimmons, and sesame seeds, soup with konbu and mushrooms, rice, a banana and tea. This is typical of what I eat for lunch most days, and to say that I was happy to eat it shows how much my food tastes have changed since I moved here.

One day a month, the school’s cook (or cook teacher, as she is called, as opposed to lunch lady) takes a day off, and all the children bring an obento to school. It would be unfair to simply translate obento as a lunch box, as there is a lot more care in presentation and health that goes into these meals. The containers are small but are meant to contain several different foods. Children also bring small plastic mats to sit on, and we eat outside.

The NY Times recently had a nice article on them, for more info, but take a look for yourself:

and mine, lacking in cartoon faces.