Use and Cooking Method for Vegetables in School Lunches for Nursery Children

Abstract

An analysis was conducted of 291 school lunch menus for about 2,250 pre-school children of 3 to 5 years old to identify the use and cooking method for vegetables. Japanese dishes appeared in 66% of the menus. Many of these were soups, dressed dishes, and simmered dishes, with a few using oil. Vegetables made up about 30% of the menu content, most of which covered 61 items. Vegetables were used in 90% of all the dishes with 70 g of each being served. The most common combination in the menus was vegetables and fish or shellfish which made up 45% of the total. These results suggest that the school lunches offering vegetables were based on Japanese dishes using various foods and cooking methods and that pre-school children were acquiring the experience of eating sufficient vegetables.