School Lunches Using Local Specialty Ingredients Hit Hard by High Prices; Increased Costs Make Serving Special Dishes Difficult

The Yomiuri Shimbun

11:32 JST, July 6, 2025

High prices have been affecting school lunch services in various parts of the country.

In Nagoya, a special menu using eel that had been offered once every year was discontinued this fiscal year.

In Japan, efforts to use local specialty foods in school lunches have become widespread since the foods also play the role of educating children about local cuisine and locally produced foodstuffs. Those in charge of providing school lunches are racking their brains to cope with the rising costs of food ingredients.

Costing ¥100 mil.

In fiscal 2018, Nagoya started a “Daisuki-Nagoyameshi!” (We love Nagoya meals!) Day, in which regional cuisine is served for school lunches at about 260 municipal elementary schools, although the meals were featured only once every school term.

Among them, “unagimabushi” is a popular lunch menu item among the children. The idea came from “hitsumabushi,” one of Nagoya’s local cuisines that also comprises of steamed rice topped with finely chopped, broiled eel.

The city government covers the usual cost of a school lunch service set at ¥320 per meal, by putting together the school lunch fees paid by students’ households and a subsidy extended in light of the higher prices.

However, this special menu uses domestically raised eel, which results in an additional cost of ¥800 per meal. As the city provides school lunches to about 120,000 students, the city’s annual expenditure on school lunch eel has been coming to about ¥100 million per year.

This fiscal year, however, the city’s budget has been strained by its accumulated expenses, including those for the Aichi-Nagoya 2026 Asian Para Games, which the city will host next year.

As the subsidy for school lunches has swollen to about ¥1.18 billion in total, the city decided to cut unagimabushi from the menu offerings this year.

The city plans to continue offering other relatively inexpensive, regional cuisines such as kishimen, flat udon in a thick soup.

“We hope we can offer attractive menu items while maintaining their quality,” said an official in charge of the school lunch service at the city board of education

Meanwhile, the city of Moriya in Ibaraki Prefecture remains unsure about how to manage to offer hashed beef using “Hitachi Beef,” a brand-name wagyu beef, as a school lunch menu.

The city’s budget for school lunch ingredients this fiscal year is set at approximately ¥490 million, within which its annual menu offerings for elementary and junior high schools are decided. The hashed beef is a popular menu item, and the center in charge of catering is concerned about how it can keep it on the menu within the city’s annual budget.

“Ryusendo Kurobuta,” Berkshire pork from Ryusendo, is specialty of Iwaizumi in Iwate Prefecture and the town serves school lunches using the brand-name pork several times a year. But the municipal government said the prospect for offering it looks dim this year.

‘If only once a year’

On the other hand, some municipalities have decided to continue their local specialty menus despite the rising cost of procuring the ingredients.

The Fukuyama city government in Hiroshima Prefecture has served dishes such as “tai-meshi,” sea bream rice, a rice dish boiled with locally caught sea bream.

Despite difficulty in making ends meet in offering the school lunch service due to the soaring price of rice, the local board of education intends to continue the menu.

“Taking the perspective of local production for local consumption as well as teaching children about local foods, we would like to continue to give children opportunities to enjoy local dishes,” said an official of the education board.

This fiscal year, the Fukui prefectural government has launched a subsidy program to help municipalities add a side dish or dessert made from locally produced ingredients.

In the city of Awara in the prefecture, locally grown Marseille melons were served this academic year that were twice the size of those offered in a usual year.

There are even such cases in which local specialty food is offered for a school lunch thanks to the cooperation extended by a local community. In Imizu, Toyama Prefecture, sixth graders are given one whole red snow crab per student for lunch once a year.

The snow crab is an expensive ingredient that cannot usually be offered as a school lunch menu item by the city, whose school lunch expenses are set at ¥320 per meal.

However, the local association of fisheries cooperatives provides it free of charge, allowing the city to continue to provide the crab lunch. Staff of cooperatives even teach students how to cook and eat the crab, according to the city.

“We are very grateful that they continue to provide the crab despite the poor catch due to the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake,” said a city official.