Nan-Hu Elementary’s Class 603 looks different today!

The boys are dressed in suits and jackets, many wearing eye-catching neckties and bowties; the girls are wearing beautiful Western-style dresses. They look like ladies and gentlemen preparing to attend a banquet.

Before the grand luncheon, they first had to undergo training in Western dining etiquette. The kids listened with relish as dietician Xu Yu­zhen explained in detail the placement of napkins and cutlery, how boys were to help seat the girls from the left, how bread should be broken into bite-sized pieces, and how soup should be spooned up in an outward movement.

Nan-Hu Elementary School’s multicultural meals build an international awareness in students that should last a lifetime.

Big city resources

Nan-Hu is Taipei’s first elementary school serving lunches from a public onsite kitchen staffed and operated by a private contractor.

Principal Hsiao Fu-sheng states that it’s hard for schools to find the expenses to hire kitchen staff because average salaries are higher in Taipei. But 16 years ago, the school commissioned businesses, on an open tender basis, to provide dedicated kitchen staff in the school to prepare lunches whose quality were to be supervised by school administration and the students’ parents.

The kitchen, which cost NT$10 million to build, is located in the basement and furnished with a variety of equipment. There’s even an air shower of the kind often seen in high-tech factories, and also a walk-in cold storage unit. With the 13 kitchen staff members wearing face masks, dustproof suits, hairnets and overshoes, the hygiene standards rival the best centralized kitchens.

What’s even more impressive is that Nan-Hu Elementary School has a rich and varied lunch education program.

Starting in third grade, the students of the school attend an annual Multicultural Luncheon on a different theme each year. Each student pays NT$45 for daily meals, and the costs of the annual Multicultural Luncheon are covered by the school.

The Multicultural Luncheon usually starts with traditional Taiwanese food, giving students the chance to sample­ Taiwanese street food like danzai noodles, steamed rice cakes, and oyster noodles, and learn about the origins and flavors of different Taiwanese dishes.

Dietician Xu notes that a society’s food culture is closely linked to its historical context; for instance, Taiwanese food tends to be salty and sweet, perhaps because in the mid-17th century, Koxinga’s general Chen Yong­hua encouraged the people to develop the agricultural economy by growing sugar cane and building salt farms.

Soups and stews are common fare among Taiwan’s street foods; this is related to the Qing government’s restriction on settlement in Taiwan to unmarried men. “For single men, throwing all your ingredients into one pot is the easiest way to cook a meal,” says Xu.

Nan-Hu Elementary School’s multicultural meals build an international awareness in students that should last a lifetime.

International awareness

After gaining a grounding in local culture, the next step is to go international, with lessons on the exotic cuisines of Japan, Thailand, Italy and Africa.

The sixth graders, as they prepare to complete elementary school, have to learn formal Western etiquette. All of the international menus are jointly designed by dieticians and catering contractors.

For the sake of authenticity, they sample dishes at Moroccan and Egyptian restaurants in the city and seek out exotic foods such as African millet, ostrich meat and mint tea. They even sawed down some discarded school desks and chairs, repurposing them into Japanese-style dining tables so that the children can kneel on mats on the floor as they eat.

The social meanings behind foods are a natural focus for class discussion. For instance, when presenting Italian cuisine, Xu talks about Italy’s slow food movement, and how Italians often take as long as two hours to finish a meal. Their leisurely food culture also demands natural and organic ingredients.

Nan-Hu values international exchange, conducting international field trips so students can personally try school lunches on site in other ­countries.

Principal Hsiao says that when the children interact with students from other countries, the most common topic asked is, “What do you eat?” After some comparison, they found that the school lunches in Taiwan are actually pretty good.

Over the winter break this year, Nan-Hu students visited Singapore’s ­Chongfu Primary School and found that Singapore do not offer school lunches that are carefully measured for calories and whose ingredients are strictly selected; instead, the students eat whatever they want at the school cafeteria, which resembles a food court.

Nan-Hu sixth grader Xu Yuan­wei says that at first he found it refreshing to buy what he liked. But soon he found that the food at the different stalls tasted almost the same: how boring! The school lunches in Taiwan were better.

In fact, the management of a school lunch program isn’t all about how much of the budget is spent. Just take a look at Nan-Hu, whose unique, fun and educational Multicultural Luncheons build an international awareness in students that should last a lifetime.

Taiwan’s nutritious lunch program has received international acclaim because of these schools’ attentive design and management.

In the Japanese cuisine class, students wear Japanese robes as they kneel on mats on the floor to eat, trying to emulate reserved Japanese people for a day.