They have it, but not many of them eat it that often.
It’s something neither they are familiar or particularly fond of. They don’t see peanut butter as something healthy, and rarely given to children. It sounds even worse when it’s spread on a piece of bread with sugary jelly. When I say this, I know many Americans would be upset and would lecture me on how healthy and nutritious their staple lunch is. Let me first show you what we eat for lunch growing up:
…in case you are wondering, we eat bread too…
They don’t seem to just give the sandwich to children by itself. They have a small amount of protein (fish or meat), starch, soup, salad, and some milk. Some schools have in-house nutritionists and cooks, but not all of them.
Even in the ’40s during the war, some schools managed to give children lunches. I found an interesting site showing the history of Japanese school lunch, complete with food samples (lol so Japanese…). his is an example of a school lunch in 1942…A bowl of miso soup with vegetables with flour dumplings. I imagine having this much stuff inside the soup was rather rare at the height of the war in hard-hit areas, though.
Below combo is an example from 1946, right after the war.
Once the war is over, proteins (in this case canned salmon) and milk started to show up. Canned goods were a luxury back then and there were not enough cattle to feed all the malnourished children. An average six-grader used to look like a contemporary fourth-grader or smaller.
Therefore it was quite common to see a piece of ….(trigger alert)….whale!! Whale consumption was not as common but they were basically the only abundant protein source back then. If you ask someone 80-years-old or older, they would tell you how much they hated it. According to my mom, it was usually fried, stinky, and tough. To assure my tree-hugging bunny-loving friends, it really wasn’t their choice. Even today for many old folks, whale meat is such a trauma dish and abhorred and avoided at all cost…So, I have never seen it on a diner table or at a local supermarket…(so please relax!)
(I know it’s a bit off-topic, but why avoid it, right?)
Anyway, still not peanut butter.
Let’s step back a little, and see what most Japanese would think of peanuts and how they usually consume it. The majority of middle-aged people and up would think of peanuts as beer snacks. Roasted or raw. Japanese usually prefer to consume food closer to the original form. It’s not that wired for us to see a fish head on sushi. There are always few exceptions but generally, they see that as a sign of freshness…not that freshness of peanuts matters that much…
When I hear the word peanuts, the image that comes to my mind is an old man with bad breath drinking a canned Kirin munching on roasted peanuts on shinkansen. Definitely not a cute little kid devouring a PBJ.
To improve such an image, peanut farmers are working hard.
I used to live in a city that produces more than 50% of peanuts in Japan. So they try to sell in a different form. Like these cookies:
But you see, they still prefer peanuts to retain its form?
According to Japan Peanut Foundation (JPF), the consumption of peanuts is declining quite a bit. In 2016, Out of 90,700 tons consumed, only 3,900 tons are consumed in “peanut butter or similar” form.
There are more than a few things to overcome before we can spread peanut butter in Japan (pun intended). The distinct texture is not something they are not used to. But we eat a lot of weird stuff obviously, including treats in the pasty form: like anko in many traditional sweets.
It’s probably difficult for the Japanese to embrace peanut butter in daifuku right away. But if we start early, it may have a chance ?! And to start early I mean we need to convince nutrition police / tiger moms. Young Japanese women tend to avoid anything with “fat” in general. They need to hear your lecture about good fat and bad fat, and consuming the latter in moderation is nutritionally beneficial!
Image source Google
Thanks for Reading
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