Meat & Poultry

Before I lived in Japan, I thought it was going to be all fish, fish, fish, fish. And, of course, rice. As expected, I did encounter plenty of fish. But to my surprise, when I started eating what regular people eat and began cooking more and more with my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law, I found that they were eating some kind of meat daily, usually chicken or pork but also beef.

Although beef was not part of the Japanese diet until the arrival of the Meiji period in 1868, poultry and pork have a long history on the Japanese table. Japan is a small country, with little grazing land for cattle, so meat has been traditionally thought of as an expensive, hard-to-get ingredient. Now that Japanese tastes have expanded to include some Western dishes, meat and poultry are playing a much larger role in everyday cooking.