When it comes to food imports, the Japanese are damned if they don’t and damned if they do. Without imported food, their daily diet would be a menu of bland and bleak fare, but the country’s level of prosperity is now so high that the consumption of food from overseas has swung to an extreme that borders on the sybaritic.

To drive home the importance of imported food to the Japanese diet as part of a campaign to increase national food self-sufficiency from 40% to 45%, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries recently compiled a week’s worth of sample menus based on the premise of no food imports at all. The salient feature of the diet is the sharp reduction in rice consumption, even though the Japanese are self-sufficient in that grain. The ministry explained there would have to be an increase in the amount of potatoes consumed because they provided greater calorie efficiency than rice.

What would one day’s worth of meals look like in a Japan without food from overseas? Not a mouth-watering sight, that’s for sure. Breakfast, according to the ministry, would consist of one bowl of rice, some potatoes, and vegetables pickled in rice bran paste. Diners would chow down on a lunch of two steamed sweet potatoes, one baked potato, and 1/4 of an apple. The day would end with a hearty repast of one bowl of rice, one steamed sweet potato, and one slice of fish.

The rest of the diet would allow one bowl of udon every other day, one bowl of miso soup every other day, one glass of milk every six days, one egg a week, and one meat dish every nine days.

In contrast, the actual diet of today’s Japanese, food imports included, puts them in hog heaven. Here’s an explanation that appeared in English in the Daily Asahi.

Diet member Takashi Shinohara of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan questioned Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries Minister Yoshinobu Shimamura in a committee meeting about Japan’s food mileage. Food mileage is calculated by multiplying the transportation distance by the volume of food transported. The theory is that higher food mileage places a larger burden on the environment. It turns out that Japan’s food mileage for 2001 was about 900 billion ton-kilometers, the largest figure in the world.

The article notes that as an island nation, Japan will inevitably have high transportation distances. Yet, Japan’s food mileage is about 2.8 times that of neighboring South Korea and three times that of the United States, which has about twice the population.

There are more than overseas imports running up the mileage meter. Another factor appears to be the Japanese preference for famous brand names. Many people want to buy Niigata rice, for example, because it is supposedly the tastiest, despite the availability of perfectly acceptable local rice.

The article is stuffed with some boggling facts and assertions. There is the claim based on agriculture ministry calculations using surveys of food thrown out at employee restaurants that if wasted food were added to the food actually consumed, Japanese food self-sufficiency would rise from 40% to 56%. (No statistics on food wastage in other countries are provided.) In a classically clueless comment from the Japanese bureaucracy, one ministry official suggested reasons for the leftovers: “It may be because they were busy, or maybe they were on special diets.”

As with so many stories of this type today, there are assumptions and claims that may not hold water if carefully examined. One is that Japan throws away 25% of the food it produces, but this is calculated using the difference in calories between the per capita amount supplied daily and actually consumed. This might be true, but it is a statistic that begs closer scrutiny.

Another is the assertion by a university professor that Japanese food imports are causing water shortages around the world. One example is the amount of water used to raise the cattle for beef exports to Japan. Yet Japan imports most of its beef from the United States, and that country is hectoring the Japanese to fully reinstate beef imports limited because of the mad cow disease. (If there are any water shortages in the U.S. because of beef imports to Japan, this is the first I’ve heard of it.)

Perhaps the best solution is that advocated by my wife. She enjoys watching a current TV program in Japan that features visits to communities of highly active elderly people (in their 80s and 90s) in different parts of the country. The program’s hosts invariably ask the secret of their longevity, and the answer is always some special dish with healthful ingredients only available locally.

It would seem that the answer is not to think globally, but to eat locally with the required reinforcements from overseas.