Eat your peas

   School children have lots of responsibilities in Japan, and one of these is school lunch. Lunch ladies bring the food to school in little carts, one for each class, with the correct number of trays, bowls, plates, and food already measured out. From there, the students (with the help of teachers) are responsible for distributing the food. Every day, about 4 students from a class are in charge of putting rice in the bowls, vegetables on the plates, and making sure everyone has a pint of milk and a straw. (They drink milk every day at lunch - probably because dairy is expensive and the schools want to make sure children are getting enough calcium.)
   These responsibilities start in Kindergarten, where you can catch the adorable sight of two 4 year olds lugging a milk crate down the hall to their classroom, shouting "So heavy! So heavy!" By the time students reach middle school, they have become a well oiled machine and no longer need adult supervision to get food on the plates in a timely manner.

  

   Another impressive feat is that every single child eats all the food they are given. Not all Kindergarteners can pull it off, but Elementary students are pros. Children are encouraged not to be picky about their food. They even have a phrase for this: "好ききらいは無し" (suki kirai ha nashi). Literally, it means "No likes or dislikes." As someone who used to be a picky eater (and still is), this never ceases to amaze me.

   Apparently it's a skill they carry into adulthood. The other day, as I was leaving a cafe, I brought my paper cup with half-drunk coffee up to the garbage can area and put it on a tray with some dirty utensils. (Throwing liquids into trash bags is a pet peeve of mine. Mostly because of the gross, brown slush that you have to pour down the drain in the back room before you can tie up the bag and take it out.)

As I left my cup on the tray, one of the employees walked past and said, "You can just throw that out!"

"There's still some coffee left," I replied.

"Oh!!!" she said, and gave the contents of my cup a shocked look.

And she was completely justified in being shocked, because I was probably the first person to do this in her history of working there. Whenever I see dirty trays at cafes, the plates are all licked clean and the cups drained.

   On a related note, milk in Japan is whole by default and slightly creamier than American milk. It's pretty delicious, even when you drink it with a piece of fish and miso soup.