Q-Shoku

So far, after a month or so of teaching, I can say I have really enjoyed this job. I am excited to go to school everyday and look forward to what the day has to offer: from the fun lessons to the peculiar questions (coming from kids, and occasionally other teachers). If there's one part of my average day I have fallen in love with the most, it's the lunch (surprise, surprise).  Every lunch consists of rice/bread/noodles, meat/fish, soup, vegetables, a carton of milk, and a dessert (often fruit). Teachers also get a small cup of green tea. To attempt to balance this nutritional tray anymore would be to unbalance it. In addition, it is usually delicious, and at worst simply okay.
The school lunch is called 給食 (kyuu-shoku), which translates to "provided food". The name makes sense especially when you find out how it started. After the war, a lot of families couldn't afford lunches for their kids, so the government decided to provide everyone with a lunch at school. The purpose of this gradually changed from simply putting food in a belly to providing a nutritional meal.
Meals for all of the schools in the entire city are prepared in a nondescript building next to the mall, packed in travel containers, loaded onto delivery trucks, and delivered to schools in the late morning. The containers are then distributed onto carts, with each classroom getting a cart. Students take turns dishing out the food to their classmates everyday, and everyone eats lunch in the classroom together.
With everything being made in the same place, all of the schools in the city have the same thing for lunch. There's a calendar to help you keep track, so you know what you're going to get. The lack of choice would be a problem if it wasn't for incredible variety and previously mentioned high-quality of the food. How the quality remains so high on such a large scale is beyond me. Thinking about the amount of food needed to feed one school seems like a ton, I can't imagine a few dozen schools. With the great variety, I have been able to (and also somewhat forced) to try new things I otherwise would not have had. Mainly because I would never think of ordering them or because I have no idea where to actually get them. I've had fish a bunch of times already, but it's always a very different kind of fish. I don't know what restaurant or part of the grocery store I would go to to get whale, nor would I know how to prepare it. So in very many ways, the school lunch is forcing me out of my comfort zone, to the depths of the ocean, and beyond.. (contemporary Western notions of endangered species).
Healthy, delicious, cheap, filling, varied, and satisfying a cultural curiousity.