Tonami school lunch center shows how to eat bread

On October 1, 2026, the school lunch center in Tonami, a city in Toyama Prefecture in Japan, put the day's school lunch on the city's website. The center cooks lunch for the city's schools. It showed the menu^*1 and a photo of the food. It also gave children a short lesson about how to eat bread.

The lunch was a bread roll, milk, meatballs in tomato sauce, a green salad and pot-au-feu^*2.

The center said there are good manners^*3 for eating bread. You should tear off a small piece with your hands and eat it one bite at a time.

The center also explained why it chose these dishes. On days with bread, children often chew less than on days with rice. So the center adds foods like salad or bean dishes to the menu. These foods make children chew more.

1. *1 menu: the list of food for a meal
2. *2 pot-au-feu: a French soup with meat and vegetables cooked for a long time
3. *3 manners: the polite way to do something