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Japanese school lunch noodles fried so hard that children and teachers chip teeth, go to hospital

Scott Wilson Mar 13, 2021
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Underneath those vegetables lies a mass of crunchy nightmares.

Japanese schools are well known for providing healthy, balanced lunches for students, especially compared to other certain countries where fries and pizza are the lunchtime norm.

But despite their excellent track record, every now and then there’s going to be a slip up. That’s what happened on March 11 at Asaka Daigo Elementary School in Asaka City, Saitama Prefecture.

Seven people, one teacher and six students, ended up with chipped teeth after eating the school lunch, and three of the children had to go to the hospital. The cause of their injuries: the noodles were fried too hard.

▼ Not the sensei you want to be seeing after lunch.

The meal in question was sara udon (“plate udon”), a dish from Nagasaki that puts cooked vegetables and meat on top of fried noodles. Unlike other udon dishes, the noodles are supposed to be crispy, rather than soft and chewy.

▼ Check out 3:18 in this video to see the toppings
put on top of the fried, crunchy noodles.

Apparently what went wrong was the cooking time for the noodles. Instead of being fried for two to three minutes as they should be, they were fried for ten minutes, turning them extremely hard. The staff who cooked the food on-site at the school did not have instructions for the correct cooking time and opted to fry them longer because “they didn’t look done yet.”

What’s more, the previous day, sixth-grade children were served donuts that had expired a year ago, due to a delivery mistake.

The school’s lunch department has said that they are taking measures for this to not happen again, but Japanese netizens had a lot of pressing concerns:

“The kids are told to eat everything, so they did, even if it hurt them.”
“They’re supposed to eat quietly too, so they couldn’t even ask for help.”
“Awful, imagining them forcing themselves to eat something so hard.”
“And the donuts too… what is going on there?”
“I can’t believe the teacher broke their tooth too.”

While we don’t know the details of what happened with the teacher, they were probably expected to act as a good role model for the kids and eat their meal no matter what, so that the kids would eat theirs too. On normal days that’s not a bad idea, but unfortunately it had regrettable consequences here.

First elementary kids aren’t allowed to wear underwear during gym class, and now this? It’s only a matter of time before something really weird happens, like a teacher stealing students’ right-foot shoes from their cubbies.

Source: NHK via Hachima Kiko
Top image: Gahag, Flickr/Banzai Hiroaki (Edited by SoraNews24)
Insert image: Gahag
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