Food and Japan

I think the food situation here might drive me a little crazy.  Japanese food may be healthy compared to the normal American diet, but it's not as healthy as what I'm used to.  I finally found a store that sells brown rice for maybe 150% of the cost of white rice, all the prepackaged meals use white rice, and it's like they've never heard of brown bread.  Every bread I've seen so far is basically Wonderbread; the 'rye' was white bread with brown flakes.

It's not all bad - I can easily get bananas, Fuji apples, prebaked sweet potatoes, and soba noodles.  There's also a wide range of vegetables, though that won't be useful until I can cook.  I also figured out soy milk, thanks to a fellow teacher in training.  I can buy corn flakes at 200 yen for 200g, though the rest of the meager selection is around 300-400 yen for maybe 250g of cereal.  I'm still having trouble reading the labels, though it looks like most products lump carbs and sugar together, making it hard to tell how sweet something will be.

I'm grateful that most restaurants here have pictures of the food on their menus, so all I have to do is point and say kore wa kudasai (please bring me that one.)  That said, not EVERY restaurant menu has pictures.  The school staff and I went to dinner last night for a welcome party, and the menu was entirely illegible to me.  I haven't eaten at any of the places in the department store yet because they don't seem to have picture menus.  A little variety also wouldn't hurt; almost every restaurant I've seen is a Japanese place, sometimes specialized and sometimes not.  This isn't really a surprise, but back in the US I was spoiled with food from every part of the world.  I was actually excited to find an Indian place today in my wanderings, though I don't know how expensive it is.  There's an Italian restaurant across the street from my hotel, but it's way out of my price range.

I'm looking forward to being able to cook for myself, though it's clear that attempting to maintain my San Francisco liberal elitist healthy diet will be extraordinarily difficult here =P