The British press says (or perhaps it is fake news caused by the rivalry with the country on the other side of the English Channel, and the envy of its cheeses and its lifestyle in general) that in France traditional bakeries are in crisis , fewer and fewer people are queuing up to buy the baguette on duty, 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 a head, in advance and non-refundable) to sit at a small counter and watch the sushi master boil the rice in its fair point, loose and not caked, makes a mold with his hands and then rolls it up, they are very attentive to a change that is largely generational. Will Japanese food stop being what it has been until now, and will they reflect it on their menus?
Rice consumption peaked in Japan in 1962, an average of 118 kilos a year per person or five bowls a day, and was the basis of all three meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Currently it is less than half (50 kilos), and households spend more on another cereal until recently associated with the West: bread (which many call that, as in Spanish, a derivation of the Portuguese word pao). . But not a French baguette or a Spanish loaf, but a soft, fluffy sweet bread, similar to the one used in your sweets, made from white flour, yeast, milk or powdered milk, butter, salt and sugar. Will it soon also be served in London restaurants like Sushi Masade Belsize Park or Jin Kichi in Hampstead? Or at Sushi Takeda and Sushi Tamade Los Angeles?
Several factors have contributed to the gradual substitution of rice for bread. One is the proliferation of one-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 rising little by little, popularizing toast with hard-boiled eggs instead of the traditional rice bowl with fish, miso soup, and pickles for breakfast. And we must not rule out globalization and the eagerness to try different, less orthodox flavors, which may seem sophisticated.
Preparing rice takes time (washing and rinsing first, then boiling), and most Japanese are not up for it early in the morning, before going to work or school. Japanese restaurants in London do not serve breakfast, so this trend is not something that affects their menus at the moment, but they are not oblivious to changes in customs, and the fact that 68.1% of the country’s population say that you only eat rice once a day, and only 16.8% in the three meals. Bread may be going backwards in France, but it’s advancing in Japan.
The decline in domestic consumption has made rice producers pin their hopes on the foreign market and global interest in Japanese cuisine, considered very healthy and an important factor in the longevity of the Japanese (although perhaps fish has more than see that cereal), and exports have increased from 4,515 tons in 2014 to five times more today. To keep it that way, they need restaurants in New York, Barcelona, ??or Sydney to continue offering ramen, donburi, bento, onigiri, and other traditional dishes like gyudon, a soupy bowl of meat, rice, and onion, with a touch of soy and perhaps a splash. of sake, which costs about four euros and is popular among office workers on a budget to eat out (when the Yoshinoya chain, with 1,200 stores nationwide, raised the price in 2021 for the first time in seven years, it was a national tragedy).
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the rice stock market was the Japanese equivalent of Wall Street. But not only bread but also pasta and flour-based products have been eating up the ground for some time. “Without rice there is no life”, says an old proverb. But now the government encourages farmers to grow wheat (almost all of it is imported) and French bakeries have proliferated in Tokyo. Those that, according to the English press, interest Parisians less and less…
