The British press says (or maybe it’s fake news fueled by rivalry with the country on the other side of the English Channel, and envy of its cheeses and lifestyle in general) that in France traditional bakeries are in crisis, fewer and fewer people are queuing to buy the baguette, and fast food restaurants are replacing bistros. In any case, in Japan it is the opposite, and bread is stealing ground from rice, to the despair of purists of culinary culture.
The Japanese restaurants in London, Los Angeles or New York, where you pay a fortune (sometimes up to five hundred euros per head, in advance and non-refundable) to sit at a small bar and watch the sushi master boil the rice at its right point, loose and not thickened, they make a mold with their hands and then roll it up, they are very attentive to a change that is, to a large extent, generational. Will Japanese food cease to be what it has been, and will they have to reflect this on their menus?
Rice consumption reached its peak in Japan in 1962, an average of 118 kilos a year per person or five bowls a day, and it was the basis of all three meals: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Today it is less than half (50 kilos), and households spend more on another cereal until recently associated with the West: bread (which many call pan as in Spanish, a derivation of the Portuguese word pao). But not a French baguette or a Spanish bar, but a sweet, fluffy and soft bread, similar to the one used in their sweets, made of white flour, yeast, milk or milk powder, butter, salt and sugar. Will it soon also be served in London restaurants such as Sushi Masade Belsize Park or Jin Kichide Hampstead? Or Sushi Takeda and Sushi Tamade Los Angeles?
Several factors have contributed to the progressive substitution of rice for bread. One is the proliferation of single-person households, where the only individual eats alone in front of the computer or television, with more emphasis on simplicity and less on tradition. Another is the cost of the grain used in sushi (and also paella), which has been increasing little by little, and has made toast with hard-boiled eggs popular for breakfast instead of the traditional bowl of rice with fish, miso soup and marinated And we must not rule out globalization and the greed to taste different, less orthodox flavors that may seem sophisticated.
Preparing rice takes time (first wash and rinse it, then boil it), and most Japanese do it early in the morning, before going to work or class. Japanese restaurants in London don’t serve breakfast, so this trend isn’t something that will affect their menus at the moment, but they are no stranger to changing customs, and the fact that 68.1% of the country’s population say that he only eats rice once a day, and only 16.8% in all three meals.
The decline in domestic consumption has made rice producers place their hopes in the foreign market and the global interest in Japanese cuisine, considered very healthy and an important factor in the longevity of the Japanese (although perhaps fish has more to do than cereal), and exports have increased from 4,515 tonnes in 2014 to five times more today. For this to continue they need restaurants in New York, Barcelona or Sydney to continue offering ramen, donburi, bento, onigiri and other traditional dishes such as gyudon, a brothy bowl of meat, rice and onion, with a touch of soy and maybe a sake tile, which costs about four euros and is popular among office workers on a tight budget for lunch outside the home (when the Yoshinoya chain, with 1,200 establishments across the country, raised the price in 2021 for the first time in seven years, be a national tragedy).
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the rice exchange was the Japanese equivalent of Wall Street. But for some time now, not only bread, but also pasta and flour-based products, have been eating away at it. “Without rice there is no life”, says an old proverb. But now the Government encourages farmers to grow wheat (almost everything is imported) and French bakeries have proliferated in Tokyo. These which, according to the English press, interest Parisians less and less…
