Fruit and vegetables

One thing I was told about food in Japan is that fruit and vegetables are absolutely amazing here! Seeing as I love fruit and vegetables, I was of course excited for this! One girl even went as far as to say that they are different here, and that while she doesn’t eat vegetables in America, she can’t get enough of them in Japan.

Imagine my surprise when, upon grocery shopping for the first time, I was met with wilted greens and fruit that costs more than meat.

Tubers and the like (carrots, potatoes, things like that) are of very nice quality and size, don’t get me wrong. Cucumbers are also fairly good in quality, as are tomatoes. Baby bok choy is usually fairly good in quality as well as affordable. Cabbage, too, is often very good looking and the price isn’t too bad (edit: it’s up to $3 a head like lettuce). I don’t buy onions or mushrooms or some other vegetables so I can’t compare.

Celery, however, as I’ve mentioned in another entry, is very hard to find. When you do find it, it’s very expensive. A bag of 2-3 stalks is around $1, and they are usually the yellowing, flimsy inner stalks. Lettuce, for a small, wilted head with already liquefying leaves, was $1.30 when I first started buying it. For the latter half of July and since, it’s been over $2.00 for the same head (edit: as of September it’s been roughly $3 a head). For $1 I can get a bag of 6 leaves of that same lettuce, but if I am patient and lucky at the same time, I can get that same bag for 20 cents.

How is fruit?

For about $3 I can get a small tub of pineapple chunks that I can stretch to two servings. I frequently wait for it to be half price before I buy it, however. The same with watermelon, which is now suddenly out of season.

Oranges and apples, on the other hand, can run up to $4 each. And that’s the sale price in some cases. This isn’t per pound, it is per piece of fruit. I love apples and oranges and tangerines and such, but I have yet to bother buying any since arriving here. That is a lot of money to risk on a piece of fruit that might not even taste that great. Bananas are also fairly prolific, too, but I don’t eat those at home at all, so I have yet to compare. At a passing glance, however, I can tell you that they are much riper and smaller than the ones I see sold in California.

Suffice to say that my fruit intake has been rather limited, and some of my fellow AETs are flabbergasted that I would snub my nose at expensive fruit. Truth is, when they’re affordable, I will eat apples every day just about. My favorite apples back in America average about $3 or more per pound, so I of course do not get them that frequently, but I know they are great. The apples here are nothing like the ones I normally eat, so I am not inclined to spend the money to try them.

Instead I buy vegetables, and I tend to get second helpings of them during lunch at school because they’re typically tasty! If I was more flexible in the kitchen I’d be more willing to try unfamiliar things on my own, but when it comes to trying new ingredients I’m fairly unadventurous.

That being said, when the price of lettuce shot up I was rather desperate for a home-made meal that was cold to eat and prepare that wasn’t a sandwich, since there is basically only one choice of sandwich meat here: Ham. Enter the okara salad recipe. I somehow stumbled upon a recipe for a crab and okara salad that was very simple to make, and seemed tasty. What is okara? It is the byproduct of soymilk. Once the milk is made, the leftover soy is basically a white powder, which is bagged and placed on the shelf for about 60 cents for 300 grams. That is dirt cheap in my humble opinion. I tried the recipe (found here) after finding the ingredients, and it was fantastic! I highly recommend a proper mixing bowl, however. I later acquired one after my trip home in August, and to add bulk to the salad I started buying the bags of shredded cabbage on a whim—I normally don’t like raw cabbage but at some point I started eating it when I’d find it used as bedding for my entrees in bentos, and it wasn’t as bad as when it’s in leaf form. Unfortunately I can’t always get the okara, as when I do manage to spot it on the shelf, there is only one bag. But it does freeze, so I’ve taken to buying it and freezing it when I can find it, just in case the mood strikes me and they’re out at the store.

Fun fact: My principal and vice principals were very shocked to find that I knew what okara was, let alone that I ate it more than once XD

Food and health

I was asked to talk about grocery shopping and eating in general in Japan, and I thought it was a good idea. Keep in mind that this is purely about my experiences in Japan (as well as what those experiences may be influenced by), and may not necessarily be the same for everyone else all over Japan.

First, what I knew about food in Japan before actually coming to Japan:

One of the biggest tropes and clichés I hear a lot is how healthy Japanese food is. Japanese people are so very healthy and they live forever and Japanese food is super healthy, it’s nothing like American food, it’s so healthy, if you eat like a Japanese person you can live forever! On and on about how amazing and fountain of health the Japanese diet is, but there isn’t usually anything specific about what is eaten outside of mention of sushi and rice balls.

Let me tell you a thing: They eat other kinds of food.

Let me tell you another thing: It is not all healthy.

First of all, take some time and consider what you think of when you think, “Japanese food.” I, personally, think of ramen, yakisoba, udon, piles of white rice, sushi, fish of all kinds and manners of preparation, tempura and other varieties of fried food, and tons of different kinds of sweets. Your list may be similar.

You know how much of that is actually healthy? The sushi and the fish. There are of course vegetables, eggs, fruits, soups, hamburgers (meat loaf on a bun), pizza, ham and pork as far as the eye can see, fried chicken, octopus, bread, this mysterious substance called konyaku that I’m told is from a plant but looks like it’s from an alien planet, tofu for days, and on and on. There is so much to eat here! Lots of things to choose from, so long as you have the stomach and funds to try new stuff that doesn’t look the least bit appetizing in some cases… But then you close your eyes and you actually try it and sometimes you find out it’s absolutely delicious! And yeah, some of it is actually good for you and you should eat lots of it.

But a very large amount of affordable and available food here is, much like in America, not healthy at all if not outright bad for you. Again, much like in America, food that is very good for you, is also very expensive and not always of very good quality.

“Why is it unhealthy,” you may be asking.

Because most of it is loaded with preservatives. I have been told you’re not supposed to drink the broth in ramen and udon. It’s advised to not eat yakisoba more than 2-3 times a week, if that frequently. These are some pretty basic staples of Japanese food as far as foreigners are aware, yet we’re told to consume them sparingly. Why?

Massive amounts of sodium.

Sodium is measured in milligrams on nutrition labels. I have picked up a package of yakisoba and checked the nutrition. The level of sodium is usually over 1,000. Per serving. I picked up one package in particular, and they didn’t even bother with milligrams. It straight up said there were 2.1 grams of sodium. Fortunately that isn’t for the actual noodles but the sauces that they come with. If you opt not to use the sauce, you’d be fine. If you opted not to drink the broth, you’d be fine. I for one love the sauce and the broth. I don’t much see the point in eating noodles without the intended sauce or the broth; I might as well eat spaghetti.

I don’t need to explain why fried food is unhealthy (I hope), but it is everywhere here. Probably more so than in America (I’m from California, though). There is fried chicken, fried fish, fried vegetables, fried pork, fried beef, fried sweets, fried this, fried that. And it’s not all fried in tempura, which people would have you believe is the healthy way to fry food (pro tip: it’s not. It’s still breading, it’s still oil). It’s also fairly cheap, and very convenient. So, the next time someone makes a crack about how Americans fry everything, I will say, “Have you been to Japan?” About the only thing I haven’t seen fried here is fruit, but I’m sure they tried it.

“Well, the Japanese diet of fish and vegetables is absolutely healthy!” you cry. And I would agree with you: Fish and vegetables are damn healthy, but the combination is hardly a unique diet to Japan. You can find that sort of diet in a lot of places with a coast line and a fishing industry. Furthermore, people don’t eat just “fish and vegetables” anymore. They eat rice, and ramen, and tempura, and udon, and yakisoba, and fried food. They also eat tons and tons of convenience store food, which is, once again, packed with preservatives so that it can sit there all day waiting for some poor soul with no time, energy, or skill to cook food at home to finally stumble in at 10 at night to desperately scrounge around the 24-hour store for something resembling food, a substance they likely have not had since lunch time, if they had it all.

*I personally don't think I have a sensitive stomach, but the last several times I got food at a convenience store, it bothered my stomach and didn't stay in there for very long.

Often times you can find people snacking on starchy things that have almost no nutrition or protein to speak of and, if you know anything about proper nutrition and eating habits, you know that this is not healthy eating. We criticize fad diets and crash diets that exemplify such practices, and here we have an entire culture living it day to day.

Let me tell you a thing: Japanese people are not all healthy. They are run down, they are exhausted, they are sick just as often as we are, they are under tremendous amounts of stress and pressure from work, family, and society in general, the conditions that they frequently allow themselves to work under prevent them from doing much of anything outside of work (as far as teachers are concerned, anyway), and they don’t eat properly. And a lot of them are in fact fat.

Sound familiar?