How long could you go without food from home?
 

How long do you think you could live in Japan just on Japanese food? How long could you go without pasta, hamburgers, or whateverare your staples at home?

I could eat カツカレー every day.

I do eat curry very often. The answer though is... maybe a week? I mean it's not like Japanese grocery stores lack what I would eat in the States... O_o

I think he meant more than that, Jup. I don't go out that much, but I certainly use western ingredients. Going 和食 all the time would be a pain in the rear.

I didn't necessarily mean fast food, but the food you normally eat.

After spending a year in Japan i know that i can live without any western food for about 1 month. After that i really wanted to eat some food from home. Even so i like Japanese food, i feel like i need some western food once in a while. The longer i stayed in Japan the more i wanted to eat Western food.
It wasnt so bad in Korea because their style of food is quite different from Japanese.

I'm so used to my moms cooking that I think i could only do a week. >.>
other peoples food regardless of what country I am in is just not the same.

I usually do quite well; I guess before I'm really craving something English, about a month. Depends on how well everything else is going. I eat a lot of asian food as a matter of course anyway, so the 'change' doesn't bother me. I guess I used to make things like risotto and roast chicken once or twice a month and go for pasta when I was feeling too lazy to do anything more adventurous. It took me a much longer time, about 6 months or so, before I really hit the cravings for a bottle of decent wine and some non-plastic cheese. Oh and the lack of proper sausages makes me sad.

Tea however, is a different story. I think I got about a week before I was e-mailing home asking for proper tea because all I could find was Lipton's yellow label *blech blech ptooey!*, or 10 Twinings tea bags for something ridiculous like 400 yen D: Definitely something I will take with me if I go out to Japan again.

I haven't tried it before, however I don't think it's too much of a problem. However we all know that not even Japanese people eat purely Japanese food all the time. For example, I live in the UK and eat as much foreign food as British food. On just Japanese food I can imagine maybe a couple of months (but of course that is just a guess). But I'd have no problem going forever if there was other food every so often.

I've never really tried, but I say I could go for a few months, to a few years.

I don't know much about Japanese cusine, but I know one thing: Japanese food = seafood, and seafood is my comfort food. So I could live at least two months on a good sized bag of raw shrimp, and not be out of my comfort zone. After that, I would probably find some kind of other seafood-type meal to eat for the next few months. The only problems I would think I'd come across would be not being able to find or fix the food.

I could live for quite some time on Japanese food...

To be honest, that would be extremely difficult.
I live in the south, in Louisiana, and the food here is a big thing.
Food is usually one of the tourist attractions anyway, so that
should give you an idea. Lots of spicy, hot foods. It should be
no surprise that we have a high obesity rate.
Sooooo, I really have no idea how long I could go. I've never had
Japanese food before, so I'd have to get an idea of how similair
and different they are first.

Im actually really glad you asked this. This is something i have wondered after I went to Japan and had Japanese exchange students at my school. When we were in Japan a large majority of my schools Americans barely went a week before they wanted a cheeseburger. I didn't find it that difficult to do, but I usually dont eat "American" food, however you want to classify it. When we had our Japanese exchange students come to our school, they almost instantly were in need of Japanese food. They went maybe two weeks and then had to order stuff from home. I think the Japanese students have a harder time because they have less access to other ethnic foods, and if they do it usually another Asian cuisine like Korean.

Good question, MMM.

I think that I could go without the food I usually eat for however long I wanted.
Of course I would miss my food quite a bit, but it'd be a sacrifice I'd happily make.

I'm more worried about other things I'd have to give up.

Forever. The food here is gross and fattening. Besides, I love Japanese food :3

So yummy!

its called i try a lot of food and c what i like and stick with that

Forever

There were tons of decent Italian places in Shinkjuku, best garlic bread I've ever had :)

There's enough variety

I really think that you would have to be forcing yourself in order to not eat any non-Japanese foods while in Japan. I have no idea how long I could go, because at no point in Japan have I ever felt deprived of any food I liked. There are a very small number of things that I liked (or that were "comfort" foods) while in the US that are not available in Japan... But I have gone around 10 years without eating most of them. And if I REALLY wanted them, I could pay for them to be imported.

I think that if you believe you can never eat something again, you will feel much much more deprived than if it`s just a pain to get or expensive. Or if you realize that 95% of things other than ultra-processed-pre-packaged stuff can be easily made at home as Japan has no shortage of ingredients available.

These days the only strange thing I occasionally miss that CANNOT be acquired (in my experience) in Japan is cheapy macaroni and cheese with Lawry`s seasoning salt. It was never a favorite food, never ranked on a list of foods I enjoyed... But for a period of time it was probably the main food I ate. My mother spent all her money on "partying" and didn`t buy food for me and my siblings...Basically leaving us with nothing to eat. Church food pantries would hand out packs of cheapy generic macaroni and cheese boxes to kids who came begging for food.
We had an old deluxe sized package of seasoning salt and a working electric stove...

I crave Japanese food while I am at home a lot more then i craved western food while I was in Japan. Come to think of it i think i might start making rice balls for morning tea.

how long ? not very
 

I lived in europe for a few years (not japan) I found that I could go about 1 day befor I started to crave my own style of food .:ywave:

Most of the food i eat everyday is japanese, i wouldnt survive without a bowl of rice. And i dont really care for american much anyway. So yeah it wouldnt bother me at all.

Very easily as i have had to do it before. So it wouldn't be a big deal for me to do it again.

propbally a month, but my tummy will be screaming for mexican food the whole time

i put years

food is food to me. it's all calories which i can burn for fuel
i can eat about anything and everything

I find it very interesting that more than 50% of JF thinks they could go for years without eating food from their own culture.

Frankly, MMM, I don't believe it myself. What is the percentage of JF that has actually been to Japan and tried this?

I have enough trouble making myself eat healthy. If I limited myself to 和食 (washoku, Japanese food, for those that cannot read kanji, sorry guys, force of habit), I'd be batty within a month, or just eating the same stuff over and over and over again, which would get boring.

Depends if people consider the question to mean 和食 or more generally just "could you survive on just what you can get in Japan, or would you have to brings stuff from home/import it," which are two different questions. Where does it end anyway? Is toast considered 'not japanese'? Spaghetti is no more natively part of the japanese diet than it is part of the British diet, and yet both nations eat a lot of it. 和風spaghetti? Is mosburger outside of the realm of 'Japanese food'? Idek.

Could I live on just what is generally available in Japan? Sure, excepting the tea issue, I could easily go for months before I wanted something I could only get outside of Japan. Wouldn't stop me from cooking 'japanese' ingredients in a western style. Could I eat 和食 day in day out, with traditional style breakfasts and absolutely nothing that didn't come into Japan post meiji? Maybe for a week or two. But then I doubt a lot of Japanese people do that constantly either.

I meant this. Week tops for me.

I think the reality is that many of the people that think they could go for years without eating food from their own culture have never spent much time away from their culture.

I thought my question was pretty clear. It depends on where you are, but there are few things that are not available on one way or another in Japan. Certainly bigger cities will have more variety, but pretty much everything is available. If it is necessary to be more clear, typical Japanese meals, 和風 is what I am talking about. Rice, misoshiru, fish, etc. I think you get the picture.

Really? Why would you doubt that?

I have gone overseas for a period of a month and it was great. easily could have extended it however long I wanted... just a little problem of cashflow :)

This thread seems a little pointless.
Does anyone even eat the food of a single culture?
I very much doubt it. And what of the Japanese "interpritation" of western food?
The staples really are pretty similar, beef, pork, wheat, rice, fish.
All that really changes is the flavour/spice combo and perhaps the serving.
Can i eat the food as is the culture in Japan, yes indefinitly, as the culture in Japan includes KFC, Pasta, Pizza, curry, steak etc.
but thats the culture of REAL Japan,
would I be able to eat only the food in the fantasy japanese culture that exists only in the minds of some of you lot out there.
No, I wont be having Miso soup for breakfast

If you think it is pointless feel free to not respond.

I said "Japanese food" not "food in Japan"...but I guess I should have expected the nit-picking.

When I say "Japanese food" I do not mean KFC, pizza, pasta, etc. The question is how long you could go WITHOUT your food from home. I didn't realize it was that complicated.

Eat it exclusively? Always? Yes I do doubt that, because of 'imports' that now have a long-standing in Japan and are taken for granted as part of the modern japanese diet. If we go by the idea that anything introduced post-meiji hasn't been around long enough to class as traditional then that's going to include a lot of things. Chocolate, for example; introduced only in the mid 1900's, but i'd be highly surprised if there was anyone in Japan who had never eaten chocolate at all in their life nowadays. Curry rice, pretty much considered wholly Japanese has a similar story. Croquette, hayashi rice, nikujaga, curry pan, omu-raisu, all pretty much 'japanese' to our minds, but still technically classed as 洋食. Sorry, even the humble カツ isn't 和食.

Moreover, 和食 is more than just what foods fall into that category. It's more of a conception of food and how it should be approached. five tastes, five methods etc etc. It's a lot of effort and I suspect that very few people adhere to that on a daily basis.

Edit: Ok, so I'm arguing a lot of semantics here, but I think it still stands that the modern Japanese diet is a lot broader than the kind of stuff that the word 和食 really means and it's kind of over-stretching the term to try and define 'japanese food' as being just 和食. That's why I asked, where does "Japanese food end?". Back to Toast and coffee again, or salad, which have been around a long time, but still aren't really 'Japanese'. two fold idea really, the spaghettification of japanese food, and the japanification of spaghetti. It's all dove-tails~

EDIT 2: Bother, I didn't mean to double-post. Sorry about that.

Wow, you guys are getting picky today. I know many people in Japan who almost only ever eat what Japanese consider "Japanese food". Whether that has roots in other countries is something you can argue, but by that argument there is almost NOTHING that can be considered "American food". Pizza, pasta, cheesburgers, steak, fried chicken, BBQ, all came from somewhere else.

Again, the basis of my question, if you choose to answer it is, how long could you go WITHOUT food you are accustomed to at home?

Gonna get pickier. I was very accustomed to eating ramen and sushi in Texas. Like way too often, and it didn't make my pocketbook happy. DFW has a large Japanese population. It even has its own Japanese Shimbun. But I get what you mean:

I make pastrami sandwiches at least once a week. I adore them. I live above a grocery store that has pastrami and sandwich bread. Japanese available, but certainly not something I see other people doing. Japanese people put pastrami slices in salads, not in sandwiches.

As for pizza? There is no pizza here. Those corn infested concoctions are not pizza. KFC? It's actually not the same, but I do like it. MickeyD's? Better than in the States...

Mexican food. Nonexistent. When I visit the States or have friends visit me, there are always Taco Kits in transit...

That's why 'American' food is much harder to define. It's an indistinct creature with a polygamous background, much more so than Japan, where there are things that are distinctly Japanese. Dried bonito. Miso.

I have answered the question, but if you mean, how long could I go if I purposefully selected food stuffs solely on the grounds of they are not something I can eat in England, despite availability or social normality, possibly only a fortnight. It depends on a lot of factors.

But still, that's kind of ridiculous; and the point of why probably so many people are saying they could go some considerable time. The fact that ingredients are available, and that western ways of eating are incorporated into Japanese food anyway, makes the question moot. What happens is that people living abroad balance their eating probably in favour of 'japanese food' but with 'western' treats now and then to take the edge off. They might not revert back to a western diet, but it's mad to say that they would have to cut it out completely when there are chocolate bars and sandwiches hanging around and are a perfectly normal part of food in Japan. And carrots and chicken are carrots and chicken regardless of where you are and what you do to them.

I think provided you are happy and enjoy being adventurous with food, then there is no reason why you can't go a long time before you really start to crave home foods. That's how it is for me, anyway.

I do agree though, that people who think they could go years are probably kidding themselves. I'd say 6 months would be more realistic and actually somewhat impressive.

^^; sorry to pull things apart so much MMM, I know you only meant this to be straight-forward. Your question has certainly raised some interesting points!

good thread, i guess it depends on what you have been eating during the time without food from home. i can go on for months without eating any home food because it simply doesn't taste good, even if i go out to eat i don;t eat a lot of the salty, fried, or juicy stuff rather i prefer to eat simple stuff that taste like home food. but the major concern for me is the cost :P, at least that is a factor that determines how long i can be away from home food.

o my bad, did not read the in japan part.