Correction: Glass

I was just looking over some old posts when I realized that I'd learned some new information about something I'd written a few months ago.

A couple of weeks after the "grass in the soup" incident, I was at Ai Kindergarten. Sayuri, who speaks some English and is the only kindergarten teacher who invites me to her kindergarten, said to me, "Did you hear about the problem with the school lunch before?" Yes, I told her. "Yes, it was serious," she said. "There was glass in the soup."

Glass?! It was glass in the soup? Geez, now I understand what all the fuss had been about. Stupid R-L ambiguity. My JTE had tried to tell me "glass," but I heard "grass." Sayuri continued: one of the cooks in the lunch preparation center was trying to get the last bit of spice out of a glass jar. She knocked the jar against the side of the pot, and the jar broke.

But there was a considerable time delay involved; we weren't told until most of the students were more than halfway through their meal. My guess is that the woman thought she'd picked out all the glass, and didn't tell anyone about it until some time had passed. Then someone above her (correctly) decided that no one could be certain if all of the glass had been removed, so it would be better to scrap the whole dish.

The lunch preparation center is adjacent to Nita JHS, but they prepare lunches for all of the elementary schools and kindergartens in Nita as well. That's how Sayuri knew about it.

That is all.