What a great joy it was to be able to attend one of the meetings/cooking lessons in Tokyo, Japan!
Parents' Association for Food Allergic Patients (PAFAP, in Japanese) has organized a meeting with two lectures and a seasonal cooking lesson.1. PAFAP founder Ms.Takeuchi prepared a powerpoint lecture on how to read food information labels.
She has been involved with the administrations in setting up the regulations, has been a great advocate and had been leading food allergy support groups for many years. She shared how she is proud that the "may contain" message is eliminated and is illegal in Japan, so that people are not turned away from trying things that "may contain" certain items. Also shared were specific dairy, egg, wheat names and how they can come in different forms and also be hidden, not expressively written - must be very hard for travelers - it's even impossible for Japanese if we don't have these knowledge to accurately know what's in a product!
2. The next lecture was from Nippon Ham, a big national company that produces lots of meat/ham products.
She shared how corporates developed and uses tests so that they can meet the labeling regulations set (and to be tightened further) in recent years. She also shared their allergy efforts, which has originated about 6 years ago in response to consumers voice. Now they have some fine products that are safe and widely available. Very visual and informative, and what was nice was to know that corporates actually do try to listen and cooperate with consumers! This was an area I tended to stay away - calling up companies to check the ingredients, production process, telling our wishes, etc. Certainly felt empowered that it's OK to do so, and even more so, welcomed to do so (hope it's true in the US as well. Any experiences out there?)
3. We had a cooking lesson from a professional nutritionist from a big school who was invited to come over on a 3 hour bullet train ride from the west side of Japan!! Ms. Noda incorporated the Girls Festiveal (March 3rd) theme into the lesson, and out came a really cute, and very yummy product:) More photos and details (i.e. recipi) to follow some other time if I can get permission to share them.
Just wanted to share the excitement - I'm certainly inspired to get this blogsite going a bit more. I am certainly in awe seeing/meeting these pioneers with so much energy they can move the administration and corporations. Thanks to their work in the past, I have so much more choices to feed my child today.
They have asked if I could share some experience/information from living in the US, and I hope FAAN will let me translate some of their articles. Hopefully I'll be able to do it the other way around (share some info on PAFAP's newsletter in English here) as well.
