Food education is a core concept of local development plans: the case of Japan's Kyoto municipal-level plan
Taiwan's concept of comprehensive community building mainly came from Japan, but the models Taiwan and Japan use to promote community building are quite different. When Taiwan's community building was first promoted, the government and scholars bypassed the intermediate bureaucratic levels and went directly into localities to guide local efforts, so comprehensive community building in Taiwan is generally understood as a bottom-up movement.
But in this bottom-up process, can innovative value become the driving force for citizen participation? How much structural reform can a bottom-up community building movement bring? When we try to propose sustainable development plans through community building, why is the greatest obstacle often the local intermediate bureaucratic organizations?
Through years of participating in and observing Taiwan's community building, the author has found that there are two issues that the next stage of community building must take seriously:
First, although Taiwan's community building emphasizes diverse voices, because in its early stage it adopted the approach of bypassing the intermediate bureaucratic organizational system and directly empowering and enabling local residents in pursuit of the spirit of citizen participation blooming everywhere, the result was not only that the proposals put forward by each locality lacked a close connection with the nation's overall development goals, but even though we cultivated many people with progressive values in communities across the country, our county, city, township, and town governments remained rigid and corrupt.
For example, we often see communities attract people to come and learn from them because residents promote ecological conservation, ethnic cultural reconstruction, or ecotourism. At such times, local governments not only fail to learn new values from local actions, but instead take the opportunity to expand development and invest in more unnecessary hardware construction. Under this constant tug-of-war between "progressive citizens" and "backward government," it is very difficult for Taiwanese society to truly move toward a virtuous-cycle society.
I call Japan's community building model a "middle-down-and-up" model, that is, the state first invites scholars to consider the trends of the times and the needs of society, and sets the nation's vision and development goals for the next ten years. Under the nation's overall development goals, it first improves mid-level bureaucratic civil servants' understanding of the new national overall development plan, and then each local government, according to the characteristics of its local resources, formulates local development directions and goals as guidelines for local autonomous organizations such as townships, towns, and villages, as well as civic groups, to think about more detailed promotion methods. Such local development plans both respond to people's livelihood needs and reflect the macro goals of national development, while also avoiding the problem of "backward government" and "progressive citizens" hindering each other.
Second, although Taiwan's community building appears on the surface to be a bottom-up movement, the start of community building is often guided either through government subsidy programs or by scholars or intellectual elites bringing in ideas to guide it. These scholars or guidance units that guide community building often harbor preset purposes, so in fact local residents lack opportunities for endogenous creation. What it guides is citizen participation action expected by scholars or guidance units, or is it action that residents spontaneously take after internalizing these innovative values and through self-awareness? This is very much worth discussing.
The biggest difference between Japan's comprehensive community building and Taiwan's is that, on the one hand, localities accept the vision proposed by the state, and on the other hand, residents also actively reach out to and study foreign examples, so the viewpoints and methods are created by the localities themselves, rather than created by the state or scholars (Wu Lingzhu, 2002) [1].
Since 2006, Japan has begun comprehensively promoting food education plans. In many articles, the author has repeatedly mentioned that Japan's food education promotion model is similar to its past model for promoting "community building" (Figure 1), but in order to avoid everyone imagining Japan's community building based on Taiwan's community building model and feeling a gap, this article first explains the differences between Japan's and Taiwan's community building models.
Japan's Kyoto food education promotion plan
Second, expand the targets of food education promotion to different generations of people in families and communities
The practical foundation of food education lies in the family, and it needs community support. From infancy to old age, every citizen should practice the desired dietary life according to his or her own or family members' life stage and lifestyle, and strive to expand such practice into the community. Promotion strategies include: family cooking nutrition classes, cooperating with universities to promote food education, promoting meal delivery for the elderly and people with disabilities, and home visits for families with newborns.
Third, expand the targets of food education promotion to students in nurseries, kindergartens, and schools
In addition to families and communities, nurseries, kindergartens, and schools are even more important places for cultivating children's food education. These educational units play an important role in enhancing children's concern for food, cultivating good eating habits, and enriching humanistic qualities. Educational units should cooperate with families and communities and strive to pass the concept of food education on to the next generation. Specific strategies include: encouraging nurseries to promote food education plans with distinctive features, promoting elementary school food education courses in Japanese restaurants, and parent-child food education learning courses.
Fourth, combine food education promotion with awareness of the environment and traditional culture
Kyoto is a world-class ancient capital with a history of more than 1,200 years. It created the basic form of Japanese dietary culture. At the same time, Kyoto is also the birthplace of the "Kyoto Protocol" and practices progressive environmental policy. The food education promoted by Kyoto integrates awareness of the environment and tradition, and through citizens' dietary practices reexamines lifestyles and values, with the goals of reducing environmental load, enhancing local industry, and passing on Kyoto's traditional dietary culture. Specific promotion strategies include: promoting Kyoto's seasonal vegetables to reduce food miles, promoting experience-based learning activities for local production for local consumption and raw kitchen waste composting, and cooperating with university food-related departments to research and develop innovation and popularization of traditional Kyoto cuisine.
Fifth, ensure food safety and peace of mind
Providing safe and reassuring food is the foundation for protecting citizens' healthy dietary lives. Under the "Kyoto City Food Safety and Peace of Mind Promotion Plan," the new food education plan can monitor, guide, and inspect food-related businesses and promote risk communication among consumers to ensure food safety and peace of mind. Its strategies include: preventing the circulation of illegal or inferior food, strengthening risk communication to ensure food safety, and strengthening hygiene management for group meals.
Kyoto is a historic ancient capital with a dietary culture that stands proudly in the world. The philosophy of contemporary Kyoto's urban governance has broken away from pursuing economies of scale or blindly responding to outside gazes in the direction of "tourism-based city development." Instead, it finds values worth citizens practicing in future life from residents' daily life needs. Although the content introduced in this article appears to be a municipal promotion plan, if one understands Japan's community building, one will understand that it is absolutely not a plan to be shelved, but rather a plan that points out the overall direction of local development and drives bottom-up proposals and actions for practice. Therefore, to understand how Japan promotes food and agriculture education through community building, it is very important to grasp the vision and policy guidelines proposed by local autonomous bodies.
In Kyoto's food education promotion plan, "Kyo food" is the value and new lifestyle that Kyoto proposes to citizens and to people around the world, linking the past and facing the future. With food education as its core concept, it integrates Kyoto City Government's social, educational, agricultural, environmental protection, and health bureaus and departments, serving as a pillar for local nurseries, kindergartens, schools, local organizations, production, distribution, and other related units, and encouraging groups from all sectors of the locality to spontaneously propose innovative ideas.
As a new value and new style of local life, "Kyo food" on the one hand hopes to pass on the dietary wisdom of predecessors, and on the other hand, through food, builds people's connection with the locality, protects people's health, and constructs an environmentally friendly sustainable society, enabling Kyoto to continue to show unforgettable charm in the twenty-first century.
[1] Wu Lingzhu (March 2002). Beautiful New Homeland - An Exclusive Interview with Japanese Community Building Master Miyazaki Kiyoshi. Sinorama Magazine: 102.
[2] Reference from: Cabinet Office (March 2013). Food Education Promotion Plans of Prefectures and Designated Cities. Online resource: http://www8.cao.go.jp/syokuiku/work/pdf/keikaku.pdf.
[3] The following content is compiled from: Kyoto City (March 2011). Overview Edition of the New "Kyo Food Education Promotion Plan." Online resource: http://kyo-syoku.net/uploads/education-n01.pdf.