American scholar films documentary on Japanese school lunches

Although Alexis Sanborn was a self-professed Japanese culture geek as a teenager, she never had much of an appetite for "washoku," or Japanese cuisine.As she grew up reading anime in a California suburb in the early 1990s, before the Japanese restaurant boom in U.S. urban cities, Sanborn stuck to her native Italian and American diet.But while teaching abroad in Shimane Prefecture on the Japanese Exchange and Teaching program in 2009-2011 while in her 20s, Sanborn began to love "kyushoku," Japan's institutionalized school meals prepared with fresh local ingredients in school kitchens.Sanborn…READ FULL ARTICLE