Japan’s School Food Educators: Strengthening Shokuiku , Sustaining the World?

For over twenty years, Japan has educated and utilized a ‘new kind of teacher’ to lead its school food education (shokuiku). Today, these School Food Educators play a key role in strengthening Japan’s long-standing tradition of shokuiku, and transitioning the system toward environmental sustainability. Herein, we detail the role School Food Educators play in schools, before describing how they are educated, both pre- and in-service. Highlights include a look at the menus and explicit pedagogical materials they produce which show deep coherence and polish, and how the curriculum developed by School Food Educators is much more cultural, educational, and aesthetic than scientific. In comparison with even the ‘leading’ school food education systems in Europe (Finland, France, Italy), Japan’s School Food Educators and explicit teaching about food stand as suggestively salutary. Even if these features of the Japanese system are not replicable in other contexts worldwide, these serve as a counterpoint to dominant notions of teacher education, those which largely continue to ignore links between school, food, and sustainability. The Japanese contrast may help us unlearn our ‘usual’ ways of thinking about what teachers do, how they are trained, and perhaps even the mode of ‘being’ human we seek to educate.