Traditional Wisdom for Modern Sustainability: A Dish-Level Analysis of Japanese Home Cooking in NHK Today's Cooking

Balancing nutrition security with environmental sustainability is a key priority in global food policy, with Sustainable Healthy Diets (SHDs) serving as a critical framework aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Traditional Japanese cuisine reflects SHD principles through its emphasis on plant-based, seasonal, and minimally processed dishes. However, modern, globalized dietary patterns increasingly feature ultra-processed foods, raising concerns about health risks such as high sodium intake.

This study adopts a novel dish-level content analysis of 120 contemporary recipes from NHK Today's Cooking between 2023 and 2025, a TV program by Japan's national public broadcaster that is widely regarded as reflecting the practices of Japanese home cooking, to examine how SHDs pillars-nutritional diversity (e.g., varied protein sources), environmental sustainability (e.g., low-carbon ingredients), and cultural continuity (e.g., traditional techniques)-are embedded in Japanese home cooking. Unlike macro-level consumption or nutrition data, this dish-level approach reveals how individual dishes embody sustainability through ingredient selection, preparation methods, and cultural logic.

Quantitatively, pork (33.3%) and seafood (19.2%) together dominated main protein sources, with minimal beef (2.5%) and a notable presence of soy-based foods (12.5%), supporting lower reliance on environmentally intensive red meat; mean salt content per person in main dishes was 2.16 ± 1.09 g (28.9% for men, 33.3% for women of Japan's daily salt targets), while recipe patterns emphasizing fermentation and seasonal alignment highlight possible pathways through which Japanese dietary practices can be considered ecologically efficient. Simultaneously, the analysis identifies emerging challenges, encompassing environmental issues such as overfishing and public health concerns like excessive sodium consumption.

By centering dishes as culturally meaningful units, and using media recipes as reproducible, representative datasets for monitoring dietary change, this approach offers a reproducible framework for assessing dietary sustainability in evolving global food systems.