Homemade better than catered, say students

OSAKA--In spite of good intentions and government initiatives, students are turning up their noses at school lunches.

In an effort to help child-raising families, more public junior high schools in the Kansai region have started to provide school lunches.

The ratio of schools with school lunch programs has so far remained low in the region.

Many local government chiefs, including Osaka Governor Toru Hashimoto, made campaign promises to start school meal programs.

While many guardians welcome the move, students are less impressed. According to them, the low-cost school lunches don't include their lunchtime favorites.

Due to the low popularity of school lunches, some schools have already ended their programs.

As of May 2006, 79.9 percent of public junior high schools across the nation provided a set meal, consisting of bread or rice, milk and main and side dishes, according to the education ministry.

In the Kanto region, the implementation rate of the lunch program was 86.6 percent in Tokyo, 99.5 percent in Saitama Prefecture and 98.4 percent in Chiba Prefecture.

By contrast, the rate was only 10.2 percent in Osaka Prefecture, 45.1 percent in Hyogo Prefecture and 62.8 percent in Kyoto Prefecture.

Toshikatsu Iwami, mayor of Himeji in Hyogo Prefecture, promised when he first took office in April 2003 that the city would allow students of public junior high schools to choose between taking a lunch from home or eating a school lunch.

Since the lunch-choice system was implemented at three schools in October 2004, it has spread to 21 of the 29 schools in the city.

Many municipalities allowed the option of homemade lunches to continue because officials thought it would be difficult to change conventional lunch habits.

In Himeji, a city survey conducted before the program was introduced found that 86 percent of guardians and 58 percent of students said they would use the school meal program.

In reality, only one in four students eats a school lunch in the city.

Four schools whose rate of school lunch consumers was lower than 20 percent for three consecutive months ended the program in September.

Refrigerators and shelves from the closed school pantries were moved to other schools that planned to start the meal program.

Meals for public junior high schools in Himeji are cooked at private catering facilities and delivered to schools by truck.

The city opted for catered meals rather than lunches cooked on the premises for financial reasons. The cost for building a kitchen is estimated at about 120 million yen per school. In comparison, it costs about 10 million yen to build a pantry to store delivered lunches.

The city's education board cited several reasons for the unpopularity of catered school meals: main dishes are colder than those cooked at school, and students have to order meals on a monthly basis for nutritional and planning purposes.

To keep a campaign promise made in 2003, Toshiki Tada, mayor of Ton-dabayashi, Osaka Prefecture, started the lunch-choice program in January 2007 at Katsuragi Junior High School.

The city plans to implement the program at seven other public junior high schools.

It chose to prepare lunches at the Katsuragi junior high by spending about 73 million yen to build a kitchen, a 126-seat lunch room and computer-based order control system.

Students are provided with hot meals that they can order on a daily basis.

Nevertheless, only half of the students in the school eat school lunches.

The city's education board asked students and their guardians why they don't use the school lunch program more often.

Thirty-seven percent of the students and 35 percent of the guardians replied that the school doesn't offer the students' favorite meals.

Eighteen percent of the students said school meals were unappetizing.

One education board official considers cost another factor. The city charges 330 yen a meal, compared with 300 yen or less charged by many municipalities.

"I expected that, like in the Kanto region, at least 70 percent of students would choose school lunches. But the result is lower than expected," the official said.

In Nara, six public junior high schools provide delivered lunches under the campaign promise and initiative of Mayor Akira Fujiwara.

Although the system allows students to order the day's lunch that morning, only about 10 percent of the students eat school lunches.

In Kyoto, the first Kansai municipality to add an option of catered school lunches in 2001, 27 percent of students at the city's 70 junior highs currently eat school lunches.

One mother, 40, a dietitian, encouraged her daughter to give the school meals a try. "She wasn't sure she could eat it day after day because they serve too much rice and the meals include foods she doesn't like. She also said she doesn't want to eat school meals because her friends eat homemade lunches," she said. (IHT/Asahi: April 15,2008)