Eating Your Veggies?

One of the dietary changes I made after moving to Japan was that I began to consume more vegetables. I wouldn't say it was a conscious decision on my part. It just came with the territory.

The title linked article makes many good points about some of the basic factors that traditionally keep Americans from eating more vegetables; convenience, freshness, taste, and cost.

It seems to me that in America, most households shop for groceries maybe once a week or so, stocking up on bulk at Costco and elsewhere to save money with volume. Then, you stuff all these groceries on a Saturday morning in your SUV and bring them home to cram them in your gigantic refrigerator. You put the frozen stuff that won't fit in the main fridge in your extra freezer (which is costing you an arm and a leg in annual electricity consumption, in case you didn't know) that you keep in the garage (Generally speaking, we don't have garages in most of Japan, although I saw that they were present in Hokkaido because of the snowfall).

In Japan, households (usually the lady of the house) shop daily or almost daily. That is driven by several factors. (Or is it the factors that are driven by the historical desire to shop daily for fresh food? I don't know.) In any case, most Japanese don't drive to work, in fact many Japanese do not own cars at all if they live in a large urban area such as the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area. With no car, that means you have less ability to haul a large amount of groceries home. Taking the train to work is the most popular form of commuting, and most train stations have a grocery store inside. Thus, when commuters arrive at their home station after a day's work, they pick up a few items for dinner along with toilet paper, diapers, and maybe a bottle of shochu if it's Friday or Saturday night. This allows one to buy fresh vegetables for that evening's dinner. The grocery stores sell the veggies in much smaller portions than in the U.S. as well. For example, asparagus can be purchased in bunches as small as 4 - 6 sprigs (is sprigs the right word for asparagus?). One sprig for each family member. This addresses the issue of freshness, and also makes accommodation for the relatively small refrigerators that are made to fit in relatively small Japanese apartments and homes.

Thus, the issues of convenience (right in your home train station), freshness (buy just what you need for tonight's meal), and cost (smaller portions cost more per piece, but you aren't going to have a lot of left over wasted and thrown away when it goes bad because you didn't eat that entire 40 pound bag of broccoli you got for such a great price at Costco soon enough).

Another great advantage I believe Japan has is the variety of vegetables available and regularly used in recipes. I have eaten a lot of vegetables here that I never saw for sale back in the U.S. There are a wide variety of mushrooms here that are consumed on a regular basis in everything from soups, to ramen, to battered and served tempura style. In the U.S., you usually have the garden variety white mushroom (which you can't find here normally), and maybe some "exotic" shitake mushrooms that you don't know how to prepare anyway. In Japan, we eat a lot of seasonal vegetables as well, so you intrinsically achieve variety through the changing of the seasons. In Japan, seasonal foods are practically celebrated. They are consumed with joy and vigor and gone in weeks, to be anticipated for the next year. It's part of what makes each season or holiday time special. In the U.S., with the popularity of bulk to save time and money and the addition of lots of preservative agents and large refrigeration units, this may have an affect on the variety ultimately available to the consumer. There may not be an efficient way to distribute such a variety of vegetables across all the States, so it's more efficient for the producers and distributors to deal in only a few, hardy items that will last longer.

The societal factors of less cars per family and smaller living spaces, hence smaller refrigerators make it more practical to consume products like vegetables that rely on freshness. The variety of types and preparations make the vegetables here palatable and enjoyable, which leads to a healthier diet, less national obesity and less diabetes. This contributes to lowering the cost of national health care. So, pitch in and eat your veggies!