A beautiful day today in Tokyo!  After work I decided to go out to lunch and it got me thinking…

I often hear Japanese food referred to as healthy and delicious and it is!  For Japanese people, they are easily satisfied with a meal of vegetables and a bit of meat or fish or even a meal of rice and miso soup.  By paying attention and using the seasonal vegetables and fish, one can have a delicious, fresh meal and above all, a cheap one!  To really understand, learn, and enjoy Japanese food culture, one must adapt to these types of eating habits.

However, recently I have noticed that traditional Japanese food can not always be called healthy especially dishes with soy sauce and miso.  Flavoring with soy sauce and miso isn’t necessarily bad but it has a high salt content.  Furthermore, same as the olden days, the meals tend to lack the necessary amounts of protein.  So I’m told that after the war, along with the economic growth, came high protein meals AND high calories meals.

So it seems that the “healthy Japanese food” that you often hear about seems to be wavering between the good ol’ days of Japanese eating habits while adopting the over abundance of modern Western eating cultures.