Although Japanese school lunches teach many values, there is also a lack of accommodations for certain groups. For those with allergies, parents may submit a form with their child’s dietary needs, and the school will then provide an alternate food item and set it aside from everyone else’s food so that the child can eat safely. Alternatively, students may bring their own lunch. However, although they may accommodate the specific allergy in the food, schools often do not address cross-contamination of ingredients when cooking. While there are provisions made for those who need it, it is not a comprehensive effort to make the food wholly safe (Ebisawa 2009).
For students who can’t eat food for non-physiological reasons, there are instances in which a student can have a smaller portion, yet the student must still finish everything on their plate. For many students, this may go beyond a refusal to eat due to picky eating and turn into a fear in which they struggle to eat in front of others or are physically unable to eat under the pressure of teachers telling them to finish their meal (Benesse 2024). Unlike how they try to address allergies, here the schools show an inflexibility in not allowing children to leave food uneaten on their plate, perhaps because there is no immediate physical danger when students are forced to eat everything. I have seen how this can create an environment in which students dread eating lunch at school; the environment may even exacerbate a student’s fears and anxieties instead of helping the student overcome them.
Finally, for those with religious restrictions, a study found that of a certain group who needed these specific dietary accommodations, more than half of them were told to bring their own lunches (Asada & Yoshida, 2025, p.15). Considering that some of these students might live in home environments in which it is difficult or impossible to bring lunch every day, this could present a strain on family resources.
Together, these factors may contribute to significant discomfort for certain students. Not feeling comfortable or feeling a barrier to eating lunch at school every day may cause a greater impact on a student that eventually leads the student to develop strong feelings against school.