Is Our Food Culture Killing Us?

was born and grew up mostly in Japan, the second of four children of missionary parents who went there in 1955 to convert the Japanese to Lutheranism. Instead, the Japanese converted my family to better eating. Japan’s luscious fruits seduced us first (loquats, persimmons, nashi, the ubiquitous mandarin oranges), but we children fell hard too for its “diner” foods (donburi, ramen) and fishy snacks, especially dried squid and those delectable tiny spicy fish whose bones crunched so satisfyingly when we bit into them. My parents were Western Canadians, so we mostly sat down at dinner to what I still think of as “Lutheran food”—meatloaf, scalloped potatoes, casseroles—but here too Japanese habits slowly transformed our table. Feeding four children on a missionary’s pay is no easy business. Meat was expensive, and there weren’t really any supermarkets in Nagoya or Tokyo in those days, either. So my mother biked daily to the local shops, buying small quantities of meat or fish and larger quantities of vegetables—greens, beans, those lovely little eggplants—that she began heretically sautéing or steaming rather than boiling to death. The electric rice cooker that is a fixture in all Japanese kitchens got hard use in ours, too, and while my mother cooked most of the time, my adventurous father occasionally took a turn. The food I still associate most strongly with my childhood is my father’s fried rice. He’d sauté some onions, throw in whatever leftovers he found in the fridge—two hot dogs, some cooked carrots, half a cup of peas—add a couple of cups of boiled rice from the cooker and pour soy sauce over the whole mess. To our mother’s irritation, it was the favorite food of us kids.