An Insider's Guide to Surviving School Lunch or Tales from the Fishfront or Thank God for Mushrooms

I like shellfish (Unfortunately, I am allergic as the photo clearly illustrates).

I do not like fish.

I believe this distaste is due to two major factors: fish rarely was a part of meals as I was growing up and more importantly I spent the better part of my first 10 years of life washing tuna fish salad-smeared dishes. That's enough to turn anyone off to fish.

Now, however, I live on a island. Though I have yet to wash any dishes reeking of fish I have spent an entire week at school eating fish for lunch.

In my school there is no cafeteria, the students eat in their home rooms with their teacher. Teachers that do not have a homeroom eat in the staffroom. The lunch supplies are delivered each day and everyone dons aprons and hair nets, setting up lunch. Junior high school students are trusted--everyday of every year--with setting up one another's lunch. Though the meals are portioned well, the students are a bit on the slow side. The teachers get lunch served and we're all eating with about 25 minutes until the next period. The students usually only have about 10-15 minutes.

Despite this, I have opted to eat with the students. Why? For one, I want to discover their secret for consuming 500 calories in rice in under 10 minutes. This also provides me an opportunity to learn 6 names of the nearly 500 I'm expected to learn. And while force feeding myself fish will never be ideal, I have found ways to survive school lunch in all it's fishy glory.

My first two school lunches were also fish-free (a nasty trick to play I would like to note!) which made me feel that all my worrying was for nothing. "What's the big deal," I said to myself on the third day of school lunch and then I smelled it. The odor was unmistakable. It was the odor of the shore of Lake Michigan when hundreds of fish get stranded on the sand, dying a slow and smelly death in the summer sun. And there I sat, with my plate of smelly fish, facing 6 junior high school students who though terribly shy were equally curious about a foreigner who eats Japanese food. (My predecessor did not eat Japanese food and always brought his lunch from home). I had an idea about how to handle this situation, and though it was untested I had a good feeling about it based on the mechanics behind drinking a shot of hard liquor.

Milk. Milk is my saving grace in school lunch. My routine is as follows: take a bite or two of the mystery soup which usually contains 90% mushrooms, 5% tofu/seaweed, and 5% broth; move onto the bowl of rice, taking several hearty bites in order to keep up with the 12-year-olds; and then go into the fish routine: take a tiny bite, chew once and then take a sip of milk, swallowing the bite of fish without ever tasting a thing. I have just enough milk to finish about 3/4 of the fish. I began to think of myself as a real champ about school lunch.

The other day, though, I they threw a monkey-wrench into my fish routine. They put tiny fish in my rice. That day I could only eat half my rice and half my fish because my bottle of milk had to be split between two offensive dishes instead of just the one.

Also, my mind can render the powers of milk useless.

Example 1: on a seemingly ordinary Tuesday I was in for a great surprise in the form of two fish, eye balls and gaping mouths intact, for lunch. Already I knew the head was out. There was just no way I would be able to eat eyeballs without gagging. And the tail was out too. Imaging the feeling of the charbroiled tail poking the roof of my mouth made me queasy. But I was going to do it, I was going to eat at least one of fishes' bodies. Just one fish, I told myself as I took the first bite of the worst thing I have ever put into my mouth. (Things I have put into my mouth that were not as gross as that bite of fish: play-dough, dirt, sand, grass and ear wax.) Then I made the fatal error that would end my career as a "real champ" of school lunch. I looked into the fish body, at what I was eating. I was eating a pregnant fish, with eggs in it's belly. Eyeball fish: 1 Me: 0.

Example 2: I never ask what I'm eating for school lunch, never. It will only give my mind something to fix on and then I will not be able to take another bite, no matter how tiny. But yesterday I asked. I had to. I just took a bite of something white-ish in color and shellfishy in texture. During an unfortunate episode a couple weeks ago I discovered my allergy to shellfish (see above photo of puffy lip). Scared that what I had just put into my mouth could give my puffy lip #2 I asked the teacher what I was eating. It hadn't tasted bad and I was happy, thinking I would be able to eat it all. Then the teacher said: squid, fried in egg. And I was down for the count. I managed two bites after hearing the dreadful news and then silently admitted defeat to the squid/egg combo. Simply, it was too weird to eat.

Two months ago, back in the States, I would not have touched a dish with mushrooms in it. On squid day, I gleefully discovered that my soup was swarming with little mushrooms, perfectly identifiable as mushrooms.

Mmm. Thank God for mushrooms.