As many of you know, I love food. I mean, I love tasting it, cooking it, smelling it, serving it, and anticipating it. And, I really enjoy Korean food. The soups are fantastic, the rice is prepared perfectly, and the fermented veggies, well, most of them, are decent. :) So most days the thing I look forward to more than anything is, believe it or not, school lunch.
Growing up, I almost always brought my lunch to school. I'm not sure if it was just the fact that my mom enjoyed making my lunch and enclosing a little note to surprise me or if she knew that eating school lunch meant horrific nutrition, but I always brought my lunch. And most of my friends did too. We'd sit at the lunch table and trade for whatever we could get that our mom's wouldn't pack for us. It was part of the lunchtime fun.
But being in Korea has shed a new light on school lunch. I never bring my lunch to school. In fact, if ANY student or teacher were to bring his/her lunch to school, everyone would be asking questions. In Korea, the students, teachers, staff, and principals eat the same lunch. There are no choices. Everyday there is rice, a soup, a main dish (prepared tofu, pork, fish, chicken etc.), a side dish (vegetable, greens, yogurt, fruit), and of course, kimchi. Everything made fresh and almost 90% from scratch. And all delicious (minus octopus/squid days)! Some days I have an entire fish on my tray, other times it's duck or chicken. Today we even had quail eggs mixed in with our pork.
Serving lunch is different too. Each week a group of students is assigned lunch duty and serves the other students. Every student must bring his/her own chopsticks and spoon. If they forget it that day, they don't eat (or borrow their friend's if they're nice). When they're finished, they dispose of their food waste in a separate food bin that goes to be composted. Nothing is plastic wrapped, frozen, from a bag or a carton. Koreans believe drinking with their meal is hazardous to digestion so there's no drinks either. Students can get their own water from the filtered water available on every floor of the school.
Thus, every time I sit down to slurp up my warm, soothing soup with chunks of juicy pork and fresh veggies, I wonder what went wrong in America. Was it our need to save money? Was it our desire for independence and choice? Was it lack of accountability? Was it our work ethic? Was it trying to take the easy way out? Was it our cultural diversity? What went wrong?
Now I know there are a lot of people working on this issue back home. Michelle Obama and TV star Jamie Oliver are on a large scale while parents and teachers are working on it on a more local scale. There are good things happening. But more needs to be done.
So one of the most influential aspects of Korean education that I will carry with me is the power of lunch. It is a necessity that we take a critical look at what our kids are eating at school. If school is a place for learning math, English, and science, shouldn't it also be a place to learn what good food means? And not just by memorizing the food pyramid--I mean practicing what we preach. I was lucky enough to have family and friends who taught me the power and simple delight of a home cooked, nutritious meal. But many of our poor and wealthy families give into the ease and quick clean up of fast-food or pre-packaged everything. Whether we realize it or not, what students are served in school will directly affect their futures--whether it's what they chose to cook or what they expect from a meal.
Ultimately, there is power in having a fresh, well-cooked meal that not only is nutritious for the students, but is something the cafeteria ladies can take pride in. Take a look at these lunches from around the globe. Korea is number 2 although our lunches look pretty similar to Japan's as well:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/what-school-lunches-look-like-in-20-countries-arou
No comments:
Post a Comment