is something I no longer need to really think about, except on the weekends. Fortunately, hoikuen provides lunch and snacks for the kids. Normally I’d be worried about what school lunches are, but I am amazed at Japanese school lunches. I don’t know what is served in Elementary schools here, but New York City school cafeteria lunches meant reheated frozen hamburgers or boxed macaroni and cheese, hash browns or soggy French fries and canned fruit cocktail for dessert or basically anything that can be made by adding water or popping in the microwave. They were not exactly nutritious, but supposedly they contained all the food groups. In the kids’ hoikuen, there are cooks who prepare well-balanced and lightly seasoned meals each day from scratch. Windows to the kitchen allow you to see them in their preparations. Some of the lunchtime menus have been: Omelet with potatoes and ham with corn soup and bread, tofu vegetable balls and sauteed asparagus and carrots, udon soup with wakame and daikon (seaweed and white radish) or chicken nuggets with sauteed hijiki (a type of seaweed) and vegetables. Dessert is normally fruit – pineapple or grapes, etc. Snacks are usually either rice crackers, onigiri with wakame (rice ball with a type of seaweed), wheat crackers, yogurt or dango (sweet sticky rice). For drinks they only serve either whole milk or mugi cha (barley tea), never any juice. They even have a little glass box at the entrance that displays the foods served that day so parents can see what the lunch and snack of the day was (although the past few days there hasn’t been). I’m curious to know what kind of lunches are served in different parts of the world…
