My Lunch Obsession
Opening
the lid of my lunchbox is one of the highlights of the day, in addition to
making my teacher laugh in the school bus.
I can’t stop thinking about lunch today because I know what is in my
lunch. My lunch box is not even an unfashionable
aluminum bento box. It is a fancy yellow
plastic basket wrapped by a pink handkerchief.
My mother was halfway through her sandwich project when I came down to
the kitchen this morning. Many pieces of
fully sliced, seven millimeter thick white bread were waiting to be sandwiched. Last night, we stopped by the Andersen Bakery. Picking up the fresh-from-the-oven bread is our
routine whenever we visit Grandma Masu. Margarine
and strawberry jam are thinly pasted onto each side of the bread. It is too thin that you hardly taste any
sweetness. In fact, what I mostly taste
is the salt from the margarine. It will
be a jackpot moment when the red chunk of jam hits my tongue. I know she doesn’t cut any crust off but I
still dream about the joyous surprise of having no crust, just white sandwich
bread lines in my lunch basket.
Unfortunately, that dream will never come true. For now, at least I have something special in
today’s lunchbox rather than a tin lunch box with a red sour plum inside.
Besides,
I bring sweetened black tea in my thermos instead of green tea. One of the few simple lunch rules here is
that green tea should be the accompaniment of rice. Black tea should be sweetened and accompanied
by bread. You can also enjoy your
sweetened black tea with your breakfast toast. No other optional beverage is available, even
water. Elders in the family always say,
“You cannot drink water from faucet. You
must boil it first. Otherwise, you will
have a stomachache.” Once you boil the water, my mother cools it off, then puts
green tea leaves or other Eastern Medicinal tea leaves into the water. When you want to drink refreshing and keenly
cold well water from the faucet, the best you can do is to sneakily snatch the
water. But again, a water glass cannot
be seen on the dining table in my house, because water is not an official drink
for a traditional family like us, if you call my family traditional that is. If you are courageous enough to bring out a
pop can or a glass of milk for your meal on the table, you will be shunned or
even be declared a criminal for the rest of your life. Our refrigerator doesn’t have a variety of
resources anyway, so none of us have ever been shunned. A few weeks ago, I was overjoyed when a
waitress brought a glass of water to each of us at the restaurant, because it
was my first time receiving it during a meal.
The restaurant serves water because it is a fantasized pleasure that
differentiates from our “traditional” real life. Maybe they boiled the water and cooled it off
without tea leaves for people like us.
Lunch
menus at home have some nonnegotiable regulations, too. You never have any opportunities to eat sandwiches
for lunch or dinner at home. By the way,
American Hamburgers are not considered to be or categorized as sandwiches in Japan. Bread is allowed in exclusively three
occasions, such as breakfast toast, a breakfast sandwich, or school lunch. As breakfast toast has grown to be modern, my
parents try to implement this modernization at home at their level. Here, Mother stirs Japanese traditional Miso
soup along with toast every morning to serve her husband. The mixed up Eastern and Western fragrance
from our kitchen confuse my senses in the early morning, every day.
Old
folks in my region think rice gives you more power and a smarter brain than
bread. If you saw the endless green rice
fields in the countryside during summer, you would agree with these folks that
rice is the best for the nation. Nothing
really can be a substitute for rice, especially for older people. Bread is the food that the Western enemies
eat. Even the young hamburger generation
created the “RICE Burger” with a Teriyaki taste at the recently opened fast
food restaurants.
One
bread company is so desperate for clearing the negative image off of their face. The company composes a song to put into their
TV commercial and plays it over and over during kids’ golden time consisting of
watching cartoon shows. …We’ve grown up with bread so we are healthy
and smart. We always get 100% on tests,
no problem… I am contemplating these
claims and thinking about myself. I am
somewhat smart because I eat a couple of loaves of toast every morning. Am I supposed to get smarter if I increase
the bread consumption and perhaps eat more sandwich lunches than rice balls, or
substitute bread meals more often at home?
Am I just seeking the validation of which is the more appropriate carbohydrate
energy source for my body including my brain?
Maybe my dilemma is not superficial.
I wish I could choose what I eat because I justify it, not because old
folks have believed in eating it for a long time. Either way, I am simply and heavily
influenced by the bread company’s “Eating More Bread” promotion ads, as they
expected. I love bread! I am smart!
I am one of the easiest targets among all afternoon cartoon generations
even though I don’t have much opportunities to eat bread anyway.
My
mother keeps spreading butter thinly onto a pair of bread. Because the butter is too hard and the bread
is too soft, she often makes unpredictable holes on the surface of the white
bread. She picks up a piece of almost
transparently thin ham and a couple of cucumber slices, then, lays them over
the miserable looking holes on the bread.
The orderly lined sandwich in the yellow basket will make my day.
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