Value Village ／ Food & living
This answer is a draft. It stays unpublished until legal review and source verification are complete.
Planning a kondate (献立, the day's menu) looks like a matter of cooking skill. But Japan has had a national guide to "what, and how much" for twenty years. This article puts that guide beside a practical order for deciding what to cook.
Drawn up in 2005 (Heisei 17) jointly by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. It sorts daily meals into five groups — staple foods (主食: rice, bread, noodles), side dishes (副菜: vegetable dishes), main dishes (主菜: meat, fish, eggs, soy), milk and dairy, and fruit — and gives a daily guide for each group in a unit called "tsu (SV, serving)".
It is drawn as a spinning top (koma), carrying the message that the top stays steady while it spins — that is, while you exercise. The basic model assumes 2,200 ± 200 kcal, a day's guide for adult men with low physical activity and adult women with ordinary or higher activity.
[Verify] Check against the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries' Food Guide pages.
1. Check the fridge and the store cupboard (things you want to use up come first) 2. Decide the main dish (meat, fish, eggs, soy products) 3. Decide the staple and the soup 4. Top up the vegetables with side dishes 5. Batch any prep you can reuse across dishes
Decide first, and what is already at home gets left over. Starting from your stock wastes less. Household food waste in Japan runs at about 2.33 million tonnes a year (see #88).
Reusing the same prep is a common piece of household know-how. It is not cutting corners.
It is not the number of dishes but whether the five groups are covered.
Not if you cannot use it all up. Buying only what you can finish is the surer route.
Putting together a staple, a main and a side is enough as a starting shape. No calculation needed.
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https://www.maff.go.jp/j/syokuiku/kenzensyokuseikatsu/about_b_guide.html
https://www.maff.go.jp/j/syokuiku/minna_navi/about/chart.html
https://www.env.go.jp/press/press_00002.html
⚠️ Editorial note: the source URLs above were identified by search. Our working environment cannot reach go.jp domains, so the contents have not been checked against the text. Verify every source before publication and record who checked it and when.
What we share here are ideas and everyday practices passed down among people living in Japan, together with general information drawn from public sources. They are not official recommendations, and they are not professional instruction. Practices vary between households and regions.
This is general information. Results vary from person to person and depend on your own conditions and surroundings.
Please decide for yourself, using your own judgement, whether any of this suits your situation. We cannot accept responsibility for any damage, loss or injury arising from following this article.
Some ingredients need thorough cooking. Eat raw only foods that are sold for raw consumption. If you have allergies, check the ingredients.
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