Commentary: White rice with side dishes isn’t really ‘traditional’ Japanese food. So where did we get this idea?

ADELAIDE, Australia: At first glance, Netflix’s popular Japanese animation Delicious in Dungeon is a strangely food-obsessed dungeon-crawler fantasy tale.

Upon a closer look, however, it reveals itself as a striking parody of the popular “gourmet genre”. The series invites us to think critically about how food traditions are created and conformed to.

It also reminds us that food is highly political and that the “culinary nationalism” we see around the world — and particularly in Japan — is more complicated than most people realise.

Delicious in Dungeon was initially released as a comic book in 2014, before being adapted for TV by Japanese animation studio Trigger. Its distribution by Netflix this year has given the seinen (meaning “youth”) anime a global audience.

Despite being a dungeon crawler, the series has an unusually explicit focus on food. Our group of heroes must keep themselves fed while on their epic quest. Specifically, they must embrace (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) danjon meshii: slaying monsters and eating them.

The show’s creators use a range of visual and narrative tropes borrowed from the Japanese “gourmet” genre. Typically, works in this genre (including books, movies, shows, comics and more) feature a careful discussion of ingredients, a demonstration of their preparation and an evaluation on the final product.

The order in which this happens can vary depending on the specific work. For example, the popular Netflix show Midnight Diner typically provides the full recipe at the end of each episode.

Although the ingredients and method of preparation shown in Delicious in Dungeon are… unusual… the show still follows this pattern to a T. Whether the characters are making a mandrake and bat