The child does not necessarily even notice that
he has learned, only the adult notices.
Report on the Sapere Method
of food education, Finland
F
rom the perspective of almost everyone else in the world,
the Japanese have an enviable relationship with food. Japanese cuisine—with its focus on fresh vegetables, even fresher fish, delicate soups, and exquisitely presented rice dishes—has a global reputation for healthfulness. Japan has somehow managed to achieve the ideal attitude toward eating: an obsession with culinary pleasure that is actually conducive to health. The Japanese must be doing something right, given that they live longer, on average, than people from any other nation.
There is a higher concentration of Michelin-starred restaurants in Tokyo than in Paris or New York or London. In Japan, food filters into every aspect of the culture. There are theme parks devoted to sushi, and songs sung to noodles (“The slippery saltiness cries out / Is it my tears or maybe a dream?”). Yet at the same time, for a rich nation, Japan has remarkably little obesity. Admittedly, far more people—especially men—are obese than twenty years ago, and Japanese adolescents eat more junk food and have more eating disorders than the previous generation. But systematic figures from 2013 suggested that just 3.3 percent of Japanese women were
obese, compared with 20.9 percent of women in Poland, 33.9 percent of
women in the United States, and 48.4 percent of women in Egypt. One of the factors keeping Japanese weight in check is a controversial law, introduced in 2008, under which companies can be fined if too many of their employees exceed a maximum waistline (33.5 inches for men, 35.4 inches for women). The very fact that the Tokyo government could succeed in passing such a law, however, is a sign of how far Japanese eating habits were already under control. Almost the only places in the world that have lower obesity averages than Japan are countries such as Ethiopia and North Korea, where there is widespread hunger and food itself is scarce. Japan is almost the only country that has such low obesity without a starving population.
It’s easy to look at Japan and think that there must be something essential in the culture that makes the nation eat so well. Eating dainty and beautifully presented meals seems of a piece with origami, Buddhist temples, silk kimonos, and cherry blossoms. In China, many women regard eating “Japanese food”—meaning rice, vegetables, and miso soup—as the secret to health and beauty. There are signs that the Japanese themselves consider their excellent cuisine as an essential part of what it means to be Japanese. The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries sells the idea that Japanese cuisine has always been envied the world over.
For those of us who don’t live in Japan, the cult of Japanese food can feel dispiriting. How easy, we think, it would be to eat healthily if only we were in Tokyo! Perhaps we, too, might breakfast on miso soup and fish, and dine on greens, rice, and tofu. What tiny waists we would have, and such healthy hearts. Our happiest childhood memories would be of our mother’s soba noodles and seaweed, rather than cereal milk and junk foods. We would find a way to square the circle of enjoying food without overindulging. But since we are not in Japan, the thinking goes, we are probably doomed to eat badly. We could never eat as they do in Osaka or Tokyo. How can you eat like Japan without being Japanese?
This path of thinking misses the fact that the Japanese themselves have only been eating the way they do for a very short time. We are often fatalistic about our patterns of eating, denying our capacity for change, and this fatalism can be seen both in individuals and at a wider social and
cultural level. With our own personal diets, we often convince ourselves
that there is something vital within us that prevents us from ever eating differently. Meanwhile, we are also fatalistic about the diets of whole populations, assuming that once an unhealthy “Western diet,” high in refined carbohydrates, has been adopted, there is no going back. We presume that something as huge and all-encompassing as a food environment is not subject to modification. Indeed, when even quite modest efforts at reform to the food system are made—such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s failed law to limit the size of sodas sold in New York City—they are attacked as too drastic. There is a deep resistance to the idea of dietary change at both a cultural and an individual level. And yet, once you accept the premise that eating is a learned behavior, it follows that changing eating habits must be, if not likely—and certainly not easy—at least possible.
Japan itself is in fact a model for how whole food environments can change in positive and unexpected ways. Until the twentieth century, Japanese cuisine had a reputation far inferior to that of China. It is telling that while Japan borrowed many aspects of eating from China—including noodles and chopsticks—China never chose to copy Japan until the late twentieth century. Food in Japan was neither varied nor appealing in earlier times, and there never was enough of it. From the seventh century
ad
to the twentieth century, most of the Japanese population was in a state of hunger and gastronomic isolation. Dinner was seen as a necessary fuel rather than a pleasure, let alone an art form. Unlike their neighbors in Korea, the Japanese had no love of spice. While their counterparts in China composed food poems and cookbooks and relished the social aspect of meals, Japanese diners sat mute at the table. During the Tokugawa era (1603–1868), when Japan was largely sealed off from the outside world by a policy of national seclusion, Japanese visitors to China were shocked by the Chinese habit of conversing while eating. As late as the 1930s, it was the custom at family meals in Japan to eat in silence while consuming some fairly basic rations of rice and pickles.
Barak Kushner, a distinguished historian of Japan based at the University of Cambridge, suggests that until recently, Japanese cooking was just “not very good.” The fundamental techniques of stewing and stir-frying
were only adopted as late as the 1920s. The traditional diet was low on pro
tein, often dangerously so. Kushner notes that until the twentieth century, the Japanese ate far less fresh fish than we might expect (for middle-income families, it was a weekly rather than a daily food). For centuries, a typical meal in Japan would be some rough grains accompanied by something like shredded yam leaves and daikon radish, with miso and pickles: not a terrible way to eat, but not a very joyous or varied one either.
I first met Kushner at a “ramen noodle workshop” he gave at a little noodle place in London’s Soho. Kushner told me that when he first arrived in Japan as an English-language teacher, in the 1990s, much of the cuisine repulsed him, particularly the raw fish. He had grown up in New Jersey thinking that a certain kind of chocolate cake called “Ring Dings,” in little foil wrappers, was the pinnacle of deliciousness. But since he knew he would be in Japan for a while, and he was hungry, he kept trying the cuisine. Now, twenty years on, he is married to a Japanese woman and says he would rather eat Japanese food than any other kind.
At Kushner’s workshop, the assembled company of food writers devoured steaming bowlfuls of freshly made ramen: a salty “
shio
” broth of pork stock, seasoned with seafood extract, that he topped with a mound of springy, slippery noodles, a slice of tasty pork, half a soft-boiled egg, and some dark greens. Kushner ate with gusto and instructed the rest of us in how to slurp, drawing in air to cool each mouthful down. “This is not a slurp for speed; this is a slurp for enjoyment,” he remarked.
This fine dish—ramen noodles—has become one of Japan’s many foodie obsessions. It is far from the packaged instant kind known as a cheap staple in the lives of American college students. Though good ramen is humble and inexpensive compared to sushi, it is “difficult and time-consuming to make,” Kushner wrote in
Slurp!
, his superb history of ramen in Japan. The broth—which varies in the different regions of Japan—needs to be carefully simmered; the noodles are cooked fresh for each order; the flavorings on top are arranged with artistry and care.
Kushner’s real subject is not ramen, though, but the way a country can completely change its diet and attitudes toward food. “Japanese cuisine is neither timeless nor unchanging,” he argues. A few weeks after the workshop, I met with Kushner for tea. He told me how much he dis
liked “essentialism” about food: the notion that there is some inherent
“Japanese-ness” about Japan that makes people eat a certain way. Many of the dishes most loved in Japan today were borrowed from China and Korea. Kushner’s research has taught him that the true story about the current Japanese diet is that it resulted from “a multitude of factors,” including travel, industry, politics, geography, war, the rise of cities, and even science. The concept of “delicious” was born in Japan in 1908, when a chemist called Ikeda discovered a “fifth taste,” which he called
umami
, that was neither bitter nor salty nor sweet nor sour but something more wonderful and compelling than any of these. Umami is the savory meatiness in seaweed, miso, and soy sauce. It is, to a large extent, the concept that enables Japanese cuisine to be healthy and attractive at the same time. In the West the word “delicious” is likely to conjure up something laced with sugar, fat, and salt, whereas in Japan it signifies a flavor found in mushrooms, grilled fish, and light broths.
Yet it took Japan a very long time to reach delicious. Ramen, with its delicate balance of flavors and textures, goes against most of what the Japanese traditionally believed about food. For centuries, the wheat that goes into ramen noodles was seen as an alien grain. Supposedly, a meal was only “Japanese” if it contained rice, though most people were forced to bulk their rice out with coarser grains, such as millet and barley, or, in really hungry times, with ground-up acorns. Noodles arrived in Japan with Buddhist monks from China in the Middle Ages, but until the twentieth century, they tended to be made from buckwheat, or a mix of wheat and rice. The Japanese were also hostile to pork, which was seen as Chinese and slightly filthy. Yet over time, the Japanese came to enjoy noisily slurping up pork broth with wheat noodles so much that, as Kushner observes, “contemporary Japan almost floats on a sea of noodle soup.”
Japanese cuisine did not change all at once, but in stages. There were three crucial moments in Japanese history when new tastes were adopted, and each time, the change happened as a matter of national urgency to improve the health of an undernourished population.
The first big changes to Japanese attitudes toward food began during the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912), when Japan became an empire and opened its borders to other nations for the first time. Finally, Japan started
to make comparisons between its own diet and the ways that other countries ate. There were urgent discussions in the Meiji government about whether Japan’s diet was making its people too weak and small to compete with the West. Educators argued that to be a true imperial race, the Japanese must start eating meat and increase their consumption of milk. In 1872, the emperor broke the 1,200-year taboo against red meat and informed his public that he was now a meat-eater. It would be another fifty years before consumption of pork and beef significantly increased for most Japanese people. But the Meiji pro-meat propaganda did at least lay the groundwork for the idea that the Japanese did not have to eat the way they always had. For the first time, eating Western food could be a patriotic act. The opening up of the Meiji period planted the thought that people would nourish themselves better by abandoning their old food habits and learning new ones. “We Japanese must open our eyes [to the benefits] of beef and milk,” stated one piece of pro-meat advertising from 1871.
The second key period of change in the Japanese diet was the 1920s. The Japanese army was in a state of crisis. Many rural recruits were desperately malnourished on their traditional diet of miso, vegetables, and grains. In 1921, a Military Diet Research Committee was set up to apply the latest in nutritional science to the army diet. Under Marumoto Shozo, the new director of military catering, what Japanese soldiers ate was transformed. Their meat ration was increased to 13 kilograms (about 28.7 pounds) of beef a year, a vast amount by Japanese standards. But the really remarkable change that Marumoto made was to switch the army diet to Chinese and Western dishes with a higher fat and protein content than the traditional foods. The reformed menus—which required new equipment for the mess kitchens—included pork cutlets, breaded chicken, noodles in curry sauce, beef stews, croquettes of various kinds, and stir-fries. This was a bold move on Marumoto’s part, and one that very few military caterers would have thought of. Soldiers, like footballers, are famously resistant to new foods. Yet in Japan, the army recruits seem to have been hungry enough that they were grateful for these new exotic dishes, and by the end of the 1930s, conscripts had developed a permanent liking for them. Meanwhile, the Japanese government extended the
lessons of this new nourishing army diet to the rest of the population. Military cooks were ordered to give propaganda talks and demos and make radio broadcasts, all trying to persuade Japanese mothers that by cooking army-style, they could improve the strength of the nation.
But the Japanese only really started eating what we think of as Japanese food in the years after World War II. During the war, Japan suffered some of the worst hunger in any of the nations involved in the war: out of 1.74 million military deaths from 1941 to 1945, as many as 1 million were due to starvation. Once again, the Japanese were reduced to acorns and rough grains and sparse amounts of rice, as they had been so often before. Japan was heavily dependent on imported food and was therefore hit especially hard when the war curtailed supplies. The ration rice—given in woefully inadequate quantities—became known as “Five Color Rice”: white rice, stale yellow rice, dried green beans, coarse red grains, and brown insects. Yet when the Japanese finally bounced back from hunger in the 1950s, they boomed to a state of unprecedented prosperity and gained a new openness to the pleasures of food.