Ten Years of Douceur Network: The People, the Work, and What Came Next
說明
2026年10月16日至18日，臺灣教育研究學會（TERA）與世界教育研究學會（WERA）於高雄國立中山大學舉辦「TERA 2026 & WERA 2026 Focal Meeting」國際研討會。大享食育協會秘書長黃嘉琳於10月16日下午參與專題論壇”East Asia’s School Food Education: World-Leading in Fostering Sustainability and Students’ Well-being?”。
黃嘉琳根據論壇發表內容改寫後以”Ten Years of Douceur Network: The People, the Work, and What Came Next”為題，回顧大享食育協會近十年的部份工作歷程，包括臺灣學校午餐大賽、食育影像製作、疫情期間的食物援助，以及臺日韓學校午餐交流，並分享民間組織參與公共教育與飲食政策的實踐經驗、學習與挑戰。
Ten Years of Douceur Network: The People, the Work, and What Came Next
Chialin Huang黃嘉琳
1. Beginning at a Conference
In October 2026, I joined researchers from several countries at a WERA/TERA conference to discuss school meals, education, and the institutions that shape everyday life.
Preparing for my presentation prompted me to look back at the past ten years of Douceur Network, a nonprofit organization in Taiwan working at the intersection of food and education.
I once pursued doctoral studies at the University of Washington's College of Education in Seattle. This time, however, I was not there to present academic research. I had come to talk about competitions, documentaries, fundraising, and the many practical matters that rarely fit neatly into a conference paper.
We began laying the groundwork for Douceur Network大享食育協會 around 2016 and formally established it in 2018.
The story begins with a cooking competition.
2. A Competition That Became Something Else
In 2018, twelve teams gathered for the first Taiwan School Lunch Competition.
Inspired by Japan's National School Meal Koshien, we set out to organize Taiwan's first nationwide competition dedicated to frontline school meal professionals.
School nutritionists plan menus, calculate nutritional requirements, and arrange ingredients. Cooks turn those plans into hundreds, sometimes thousands, of meals under tight constraints of time, equipment, staffing, and cost. Their work is essential, but rarely attracts much public attention.
We wanted to give them a stage. The winning team's two members would share NT$100,000 in prize money and travel to Japan for a professional study visit.
After a few editions, the competition began to take on a life of its own.
Participants got to know one another, exchanged ideas, and sometimes formed their own networks. They discussed menus, kitchen equipment, staffing, and the differences between their schools. They also began making requests.
Some nutritionists and cooks who had not won asked whether they could pay their own way to join a study visit to Japan.
For several years, we could only apologize.
The Japan visit was a privilege reserved for the champions. It was one of the reasons busy school meal professionals were willing to enter the competition in the first place. We were pleased that others wanted to go, but we also wanted to honor what we had promised the winners.
As our international partnerships expanded, we eventually began arranging self-funded professional visits for participants in our exchange programs.
We called it the Douceur Travel Group, which sounded rather more like a travel agency than we had intended.
Meanwhile, we kept changing the competition itself.
At first, it took place in October. But the new school year was already underway by then. Staff assignments and catering contracts might have changed, and competitors were not always working in the same kitchens.
So we moved it to April. During the transition, two editions were held only about six months apart.
We also changed the meal requirements. Early competitors sometimes prepared increasingly elaborate menus to demonstrate their abilities. Actual school lunches, however, must be made every day, often under considerable pressure.
We settled on three side dishes, a soup, and rice. There is only so much room for culinary ambition in a school kitchen serving hundreds of children.
By 2026, the competition had reached its ninth edition.
3. Beyond the Lunch Tray
After the first competition, we invited six participating nutritionists to work with us on a television project. It became What's for Lunch? 「爸媽今天吃什麼？」a documentary series that took families beyond the school lunch tray and into farms, kitchens, and food cultures.
The first season was nominated for Taiwan's 55th Golden Bell Awards. We eventually made three seasons.
A Water Lotus Field in Meinong
One filming trip remains especially vivid.
We traveled to Meinong, in southern Taiwan, to harvest water lotus, a long, slender aquatic vegetable familiar to Taiwanese schoolchildren.
Among our guests was a friend known online as the “Mother of Four,” a writer and content creator whose work focused on parenting and family travel. She brought all four children.
Although we knew water lotus as an ingredient, we had never really seen how it was grown.
Everyone put on waterproof waders and stepped into the field. The children felt around underwater, learning how to harvest the vegetable. Then one of them cut a foot beneath the surface, sending the filming crew into a brief panic.
It was not quite the peaceful educational outing we had imagined.
The mother later returned with her third and fourth children to host Off to the Islands!, the third season of our series, filmed during the pandemic.
Bringing Southeast Asian Dishes into Schools
Another project began with the food traditions of immigrant communities in Taiwan.
We invited people from Southeast Asian backgrounds to share recipes and stories from home. Some became radio dramas and food education materials. We then worked with nutritionists and teachers to explore how these dishes might be served in schools.
Scaling up a family recipe is not as simple as multiplying the quantities.
Certain spices are difficult to source. Some ingredients cost too much. Cooking methods that work beautifully at home may be impractical when preparing hundreds of portions.
Nutritionists and cooks adapted the dishes to their own kitchens.
One colleague involved in this work was Wan-yu Wang. Years later, she would return to the subject as a researcher, presenting a study of the history of Taiwanese school meals at the 2026 WERA/TERA conference.
From School Kitchens to Convenience Stores
Beginning with the second competition, we worked with FamilyMart Taiwan to develop convenience-store meals based on competition recipes.
School meals are designed for large-scale production at fixed times. Convenience-store products have to meet other requirements, including shelf life, distribution, product development, and customer preferences.
We later organized cooking competitions for vocational high school students and arranged exchanges involving FamilyMart in Japan.
When COVID-19 disrupted everyday life in 2021, I wondered whether our connection with FamilyMart might help us get food to families who needed it.
That was the original idea, anyway.
4. When Schools Closed
In May 2021, Taiwan entered a Level 3 COVID-19 alert, and schools suspended in-person classes.
I found myself thinking about families living in poverty in our cities.
As a student, I had met and interviewed people involved in ATD Fourth World in Taiwan. They worked with people living in extreme poverty, including families whose circumstances often remained invisible amid the bustle and prosperity of urban life.
Their work had stayed with me. When schools closed, I thought again about children in those families. For some, staying home meant attending classes online. For others, it also meant losing the meal they normally received at school.
Could Douceur Network do something?
The Plan That Did Not Work
Farmers in central and southern Taiwan were also having difficulty getting their produce to consumers in the north as normal distribution channels were disrupted.
I thought of FamilyMart. We had worked together for years. Perhaps its network could help move fresh fruit and vegetables to families in need. After discussing the idea, we realized it was not feasible.
We began making calls in two directions.
First, we approached school meal caterers whose kitchens had been affected by school closures. Businesses that normally prepared hundreds or thousands of lunches a day suddenly had little school meal work to do.
Could their equipment, staff, and food preparation experience be put to use?
At the same time, we contacted Dr. Yu-Hsin Lin, whose community connections might help us find families needing assistance and people who could distribute food locally.
These conversations developed in parallel.
Eventually, the two sides came together. The caterers helped us develop frozen prepared meals, while Dr. Lin connected us with neighborhood chiefs in Taipei and New Taipei City who could coordinate distribution.
The result was not the fresh produce delivery scheme I had imagined. It was boxes of prepared food that families could keep in their freezers and reheat as needed.
Each box typically contained six individually packaged frozen dishes and rice, sometimes supplemented by other donated food. At approximately NT$450 per box, the cost covered ingredients, preparation, packaging, and delivery.
Four school meal catering businesses—Shijia'an, Gongbaowang, Tong Shian, and Shuang Yi—joined the production effort.
We called it the Neighborhood Mutual Aid School Lunch Project 里享互助學童午餐計畫.
From 120 Boxes to 24,222
On June 4, 2021, we delivered the first 120 boxes to six neighborhoods.
The following week, the number rose to 1,000. By the fourth week, we were distributing roughly 2,000 boxes a week.
As the operation grew, so did the problems.
One Monday morning, at 9:37, a message appeared in our working group: the rice scheduled for delivery might not arrive until the following week. More than 2,000 boxes were due to go out the next day. We spent much of that Monday coordinating with our catering partners, neighborhood chiefs, and delivery teams, much as we had been doing throughout the project. Tuesdays were our main distribution days. Messages and photos confirming deliveries began arriving in the morning and sometimes continued until seven or eight at night.
At the suggestion of neighborhood chiefs, we gradually expanded the distribution beyond schoolchildren and their families to include older people living alone and people with disabilities facing urgent difficulties.
Each box also included a small information card about food and agriculture.
We did not meet most of the families who received the food. Neighborhood chiefs and schools handled distribution, and we relied on their knowledge of local needs.
Over fourteen weeks, from June 4 to August 31, we delivered 24,222 boxes containing approximately 150,000 packages of prepared food, along with rice, noodles, and other supplies. They reached 55 neighborhoods and three schools in Taipei and New Taipei City.
Courage Before Planning
In a reflection I wrote in 2021, I described the project with the Chinese expression you yong wu mou 有勇無謀—roughly, having plenty of courage and not nearly enough planning.
That was not entirely a joke.
We had no emergency food relief budget, no established distribution system, and no idea when the requests would stop growing. We started with 120 boxes and tried to keep up. Companies and individuals donated money. Farmers, fishers, and livestock producers contributed food. Other people helped with transportation and community contacts. School meal caterers who normally competed for contracts worked together to prepare the meals.
Still, donations did not always arrive as quickly as the bills. When the project ended, we were left with a funding shortfall of more than NT$3 million.
For an organization of our size, that was a serious problem. The following year, we made an additional request to longtime supporters and finally covered the deficit.
The last food boxes went out at the end of August 2021. The project was finished, but the financial work took longer.
And our regular work had not stopped.
5. Who Pays for All This?
The pandemic relief project was not our first experience of financial uncertainty. It was simply the most expensive.
Since Douceur Network was formally established in 2018, we have benefited from the trust and generosity of longtime supporters.
Our founding chair, Irene Chen Tsai, served for the organization's first two terms and has continued to support its development. That gives us a degree of stability, but it does not mean our annual budget is guaranteed.
Our general arrangement is that major supporters provide about one-third of the organization's funding. The secretariat must raise the other two-thirds.
That means writing proposals, approaching partners, applying for grants, negotiating corporate sponsorships, asking for donations, and bidding for projects—all while trying to carry out the work itself. Some proposals take months and lead nowhere. Others succeed, bringing with them a new set of deadlines, budgets, and reporting requirements. Government grants come with accounting and reporting requirements. Corporate partners have their own budgets and expectations. Even a successful proposal may not cover staff salaries or the ordinary costs of running an organization.
The Taiwan School Lunch Competition has relied primarily on funds we raise ourselves, with only limited government support. Every edition means finding sponsors again and working out how to preserve the prizes and professional learning opportunities we want to offer.
Television production is another challenge.
The first season of What's for Lunch? received a Golden Bell nomination, and we managed to produce two more seasons. But documentary production requires substantial money and personnel.
We submitted a proposal to Taiwan's Public Television Service. It was not selected.
Making one season does not mean the next season will pay for itself.
We have tried to retain the freedom to decide which problems matter to us and what projects we want to pursue. But the availability and conditions of funding affect what we can actually do.
Some projects move forward because the right partners come along. Others have to wait.
6. Across Borders, Through People
Our relationships with Japan's school lunch community began before Douceur Network was formally established.
Japan's National School Meal Koshien inspired our first competition. Later, winning teams traveled to Japan to visit schools and meet nutrition teachers, cooks, and other school meal professionals.
Over time, we made friends. Some arranged school visits. Others introduced us to colleagues. Some stayed in touch with Taiwanese nutritionists and cooks long after the visits were over.
Starting with Recipes
In 2022, we launched a school lunch recipe exchange between Taiwan and Japan.
Three school nutrition professionals from each country participated in the first year. They exchanged recipes for food actually served in schools, not restaurant dishes or special-occasion menus.
Cooking another country's school lunch can be surprisingly difficult. Ingredients may be unavailable. Seasoning preferences differ. Kitchen equipment, serving numbers, and preparation times vary. Recipes have to be adjusted.
In 2023, partial funding from Taiwan’s Agriculture and Food Agency helped us continue the exchange, and South Korea joined the following year. By 2024, the program had grown to include 31 schools: thirteen in Taiwan, nine in Japan, and nine in South Korea.
Japanese schools tried Taiwanese dishes such as sticky rice and roasted chicken legs, while Taiwanese schools experimented with regional Japanese recipes. The results did not always look or taste quite like the originals, but that was part of the experience. Each school's nutritionists and cooks made their own adjustments, taking into account their students' preferences, kitchen facilities, and what they could realistically prepare.
From Kitchens to Fishing Ports and Farms
Some of the relationships we developed through school meal exchanges eventually took us beyond school kitchens. In 2025 and 2026, we participated in Taiwan’s Youth Overseas Dream Fund program, arranging three-week learning experiences for Taiwanese young people with the Hiratsuka Fisheries Cooperative in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. There, they spent time with people working in the local fishing industry, learning about fisheries and food education firsthand.
Our work expanded into agriculture as well. In 2026, we collaborated with the Gunma Tourism, Local Products and International Association to arrange placements for five Taiwanese young people at GREEN LEAF, a company involved in farming, food processing, and regional development.
None of this was part of our plan when we organized the first school lunch competition. But the relationships continued beyond individual projects, and sometimes, a year or two later, someone would suggest something new and we would find ourselves working together again.
7. Where Might the Next Ten Years Begin?
When we organized the first Taiwan School Lunch Competition in 2018, our immediate concerns were rather straightforward: Could we put together a good competition? Could we give school nutritionists and cooks the recognition their work deserved? And could we help more parents, teachers, students, and the wider public recognize the importance of school meals?
We certainly did not imagine that this would lead us into television production, international exchanges, pandemic food relief, and eventually, discussions about the place of school meals within public education. In fact, we had much to learn before we could even begin asking some of those questions.
At the time, we recognized the importance of school nutritionists, but we still had much to learn about their work and their role in the education system. We knew little about the school meal laws in Japan and South Korea. What we had was an idea for a competition, a willingness to try, and the good fortune to meet people who knew far more about school meals than we did.
The competition became much more than an annual event. It gave us a reason to enter school kitchens, listen to nutritionists and cooks, and build relationships that continued long after the prizes had been awarded. Those relationships opened other doors. A professional visit to Japan eventually grew into wider exchanges. People we met through one project became collaborators in another. The stories we encountered in school kitchens led us toward documentary filmmaking, while partnerships with businesses and local communities allowed us to attempt work that bore little resemblance to a cooking competition.
None of this happened automatically. Much of our work took shape around the secretariat's meeting table, where ideas were questioned, revised, occasionally abandoned, and sometimes pursued despite considerable uncertainty. We learned that working across organizational boundaries requires more than introducing people to one another. Different partners have different responsibilities, resources, and ways of working. Finding a way forward can be slow and complicated, and the organization doing the coordinating does not always receive much appreciation for its efforts. Yet these difficult collaborations often make something genuinely new possible.
Our international school lunch recipe exchanges offer a particularly revealing example. When nutritionists in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea work with one another's recipes, they do not simply transfer knowledge from one country to another. Ingredients change, cooking methods are adapted, and familiar dishes are reconsidered in unfamiliar school kitchens. Those who share a recipe may learn as much from its adaptation as those who receive it.
The exchanges have also taken on lives beyond the projects themselves. Some experiences became cookbooks and food education publications. Japanese nutritionists went on to present their work with Taiwanese partners in professional journals and at national conferences. A Korean nutritionist, through a connection we helped establish, later collaborated with Professor Jeremy Rappleye on research into a different subject altogether. Jeremy, as it happens, also organized this WERA/TERA panel. The research was undertaken by the scholars themselves, but the collaboration grew out of an earlier connection.
After a while, it becomes rather difficult to say who was teaching whom.
The same is true of Douceur Network. We did not begin with a fully developed understanding of school meals and then spend the next ten years explaining it to others. Our understanding changed through the people we worked with and the situations we encountered. The more we learned about school nutritionists, cooks, food producers, and the systems supporting their work, the more we began to see school meals differently.
Our encounters with Japan and South Korea were especially important in this respect. Their histories and legal frameworks prompted us to look again at Taiwan's own school meal development, dating back to the 1950s. Gradually, we came to understand that school meals are not simply a service that happens to take place in schools. They are part of a larger question about the responsibilities of public education and how food policy, professional expertise, and public administration can help fulfill those responsibilities.
This does not make the quality of the meal any less important. Quite the opposite. Providing children with safe, nutritious, and appealing meals is part of taking that educational responsibility seriously. Food education cannot substitute for a good lunch.
Over these same ten years, the public conversation in Taiwan has also begun to change. School meals now attract attention from legislators across political parties, local governments, professional organizations, and the media. The possibility of national school meal legislation has become much more concrete. Yet greater attention does not mean that everyone agrees on what the system should become. The question of whether school meals should be understood as part of public education, rather than merely as a food service, is still being worked out.
We have participated in that conversation alongside many others. It would be misleading to claim that Douceur Network brought about these changes. It would be equally misleading to describe our ten years as though we had simply watched them happen. Our projects have created opportunities for people and ideas to meet, while those encounters have repeatedly changed our own questions, decisions, and work.
Not every attempt succeeded. Our first idea for distributing food through convenience stores during the pandemic did not work. Some projects demanded far more resources than we had anticipated. Others, including our television series, could not continue indefinitely despite everything they had accomplished. These experiences taught us something about the limits of enthusiasm, goodwill, and organizational ingenuity. There are things a small civil society organization can initiate but cannot sustain alone. And there are public responsibilities that should not depend on whether an NGO manages to find enough donors or willing partners.
All of which brings me back to the WERA/TERA conference in October 2026.
This was not our first international exchange. But most of the people we had worked with over the years were nutritionists, cooks, teachers, farmers, fishers, business partners, and community organizations. At this conference, I found myself among researchers who had spent years studying education systems, school life, food cultures, and the institutions that shape everyday experience.
Listening to the presentations, I found myself thinking about our own work from some different perspectives. I was curious where further conversations might lead.
I do not know what will come from these encounters. Perhaps a research collaboration, a joint interview, another exchange program, or simply an ongoing conversation. Ten years ago, we had no idea that a school lunch competition would lead us into so many other kinds of work, and I rather like the possibility that neither side has to be the designated teacher or student.
I have sometimes thought of Douceur Network as a little yeast. We do not own school kitchens, farms, or fishing ports, nor do we have a network of community service offices. The knowledge, skills, and resources needed for our projects belong to many different people. What we can do is bring an idea to the table, find people willing to try something together, and create opportunities for connections that might not otherwise have happened.
Of course, yeast alone cannot make bread. It needs other ingredients, a suitable environment, and people who know what they are doing. Even then, the result is not entirely predictable.
說明
2026年10月16日至18日，臺灣教育研究學會（TERA）與世界教育研究學會（WERA）於高雄國立中山大學舉辦「TERA 2026 & WERA 2026 Focal Meeting」國際研討會。大享食育協會秘書長黃嘉琳於10月16日下午參與專題論壇”East Asia’s School Food Education: World-Leading in Fostering Sustainability and Students’ Well-being?”。
本場座談由香港大學教授 Jeremy Rappleye 策劃並主持，發表者包括首爾市立大學助理教授 Seulgi Son、JungHo Park、黃嘉琳(Chialin Huang)、Jeremy Rappleye及國立臺灣師範大學博士生王婉育（Wan-Yu Wang），並由香港教育大學副教授望月洋子（Yoko Mochizuki）擔任與談人。與會者從不同國家的學校午餐制度、飲食教育與永續發展等角度，交流學術研究與實務經驗。
黃嘉琳根據論壇發表內容改寫後以”Ten Years of Douceur Network: The People, the Work, and What Came Next”為題，回顧大享食育協會近十年的部份工作歷程，包括臺灣學校午餐大賽、食育影像製作、疫情期間的食物援助，以及臺日韓學校午餐交流，並分享民間組織參與公共教育與飲食政策的實踐經驗、學習與挑戰。
以下刊登英文全文，供讀者參考。
研討會資訊： TERA–WERA 2026 專題座談官方議程
論壇日期： 2026年10月16日（星期五）
舉辦地點： 國立中山大學
Ten Years of Douceur Network: The People, the Work, and What Came Next
Chialin Huang黃嘉琳
1. Beginning at a Conference
In October 2026, I joined researchers from several countries at a WERA/TERA conference to discuss school meals, education, and the institutions that shape everyday life.
Preparing for my presentation prompted me to look back at the past ten years of Douceur Network, a nonprofit organization in Taiwan working at the intersection of food and education.
I once pursued doctoral studies at the University of Washington's College of Education in Seattle. This time, however, I was not there to present academic research. I had come to talk about competitions, documentaries, fundraising, and the many practical matters that rarely fit neatly into a conference paper.
We began laying the groundwork for Douceur Network大享食育協會 around 2016 and formally established it in 2018.
The story begins with a cooking competition.
2. A Competition That Became Something Else
In 2018, twelve teams gathered for the first Taiwan School Lunch Competition.
Inspired by Japan's National School Meal Koshien, we set out to organize Taiwan's first nationwide competition dedicated to frontline school meal professionals.
School nutritionists plan menus, calculate nutritional requirements, and arrange ingredients. Cooks turn those plans into hundreds, sometimes thousands, of meals under tight constraints of time, equipment, staffing, and cost. Their work is essential, but rarely attracts much public attention.
We wanted to give them a stage. The winning team's two members would share NT$100,000 in prize money and travel to Japan for a professional study visit.
After a few editions, the competition began to take on a life of its own.
Participants got to know one another, exchanged ideas, and sometimes formed their own networks. They discussed menus, kitchen equipment, staffing, and the differences between their schools. They also began making requests.
Some nutritionists and cooks who had not won asked whether they could pay their own way to join a study visit to Japan.
For several years, we could only apologize.
The Japan visit was a privilege reserved for the champions. It was one of the reasons busy school meal professionals were willing to enter the competition in the first place. We were pleased that others wanted to go, but we also wanted to honor what we had promised the winners.
As our international partnerships expanded, we eventually began arranging self-funded professional visits for participants in our exchange programs.
We called it the Douceur Travel Group, which sounded rather more like a travel agency than we had intended.
Meanwhile, we kept changing the competition itself.
At first, it took place in October. But the new school year was already underway by then. Staff assignments and catering contracts might have changed, and competitors were not always working in the same kitchens.
So we moved it to April. During the transition, two editions were held only about six months apart.
We also changed the meal requirements. Early competitors sometimes prepared increasingly elaborate menus to demonstrate their abilities. Actual school lunches, however, must be made every day, often under considerable pressure.
We settled on three side dishes, a soup, and rice. There is only so much room for culinary ambition in a school kitchen serving hundreds of children.
By 2026, the competition had reached its ninth edition.
3. Beyond the Lunch Tray
After the first competition, we invited six participating nutritionists to work with us on a television project. It became What's for Lunch? 「爸媽今天吃什麼？」a documentary series that took families beyond the school lunch tray and into farms, kitchens, and food cultures.
The first season was nominated for Taiwan's 55th Golden Bell Awards. We eventually made three seasons.
One filming trip remains especially vivid.
We traveled to Meinong, in southern Taiwan, to harvest water lotus, a long, slender aquatic vegetable familiar to Taiwanese schoolchildren.
Among our guests was a friend known online as the “Mother of Four,” a writer and content creator whose work focused on parenting and family travel. She brought all four children.
Although we knew water lotus as an ingredient, we had never really seen how it was grown.
Everyone put on waterproof waders and stepped into the field. The children felt around underwater, learning how to harvest the vegetable. Then one of them cut a foot beneath the surface, sending the filming crew into a brief panic.
It was not quite the peaceful educational outing we had imagined.
The mother later returned with her third and fourth children to host Off to the Islands!, the third season of our series, filmed during the pandemic.
Another project began with the food traditions of immigrant communities in Taiwan.
We invited people from Southeast Asian backgrounds to share recipes and stories from home. Some became radio dramas and food education materials. We then worked with nutritionists and teachers to explore how these dishes might be served in schools.
Scaling up a family recipe is not as simple as multiplying the quantities.
Certain spices are difficult to source. Some ingredients cost too much. Cooking methods that work beautifully at home may be impractical when preparing hundreds of portions.
Nutritionists and cooks adapted the dishes to their own kitchens.
One colleague involved in this work was Wan-yu Wang. Years later, she would return to the subject as a researcher, presenting a study of the history of Taiwanese school meals at the 2026 WERA/TERA conference.
Beginning with the second competition, we worked with FamilyMart Taiwan to develop convenience-store meals based on competition recipes.
School meals are designed for large-scale production at fixed times. Convenience-store products have to meet other requirements, including shelf life, distribution, product development, and customer preferences.
We later organized cooking competitions for vocational high school students and arranged exchanges involving FamilyMart in Japan.
When COVID-19 disrupted everyday life in 2021, I wondered whether our connection with FamilyMart might help us get food to families who needed it.
That was the original idea, anyway.
4. When Schools Closed
In May 2021, Taiwan entered a Level 3 COVID-19 alert, and schools suspended in-person classes.
I found myself thinking about families living in poverty in our cities.
As a student, I had met and interviewed people involved in ATD Fourth World in Taiwan. They worked with people living in extreme poverty, including families whose circumstances often remained invisible amid the bustle and prosperity of urban life.
Their work had stayed with me. When schools closed, I thought again about children in those families. For some, staying home meant attending classes online. For others, it also meant losing the meal they normally received at school.
Could Douceur Network do something?
Farmers in central and southern Taiwan were also having difficulty getting their produce to consumers in the north as normal distribution channels were disrupted.
I thought of FamilyMart. We had worked together for years. Perhaps its network could help move fresh fruit and vegetables to families in need. After discussing the idea, we realized it was not feasible.
We began making calls in two directions.
First, we approached school meal caterers whose kitchens had been affected by school closures. Businesses that normally prepared hundreds or thousands of lunches a day suddenly had little school meal work to do.
Could their equipment, staff, and food preparation experience be put to use?
At the same time, we contacted Dr. Yu-Hsin Lin, whose community connections might help us find families needing assistance and people who could distribute food locally.
These conversations developed in parallel.
Eventually, the two sides came together. The caterers helped us develop frozen prepared meals, while Dr. Lin connected us with neighborhood chiefs in Taipei and New Taipei City who could coordinate distribution.
The result was not the fresh produce delivery scheme I had imagined. It was boxes of prepared food that families could keep in their freezers and reheat as needed.
Each box typically contained six individually packaged frozen dishes and rice, sometimes supplemented by other donated food. At approximately NT$450 per box, the cost covered ingredients, preparation, packaging, and delivery.
Four school meal catering businesses—Shijia'an, Gongbaowang, Tong Shian, and Shuang Yi—joined the production effort.
We called it the Neighborhood Mutual Aid School Lunch Project 里享互助學童午餐計畫.
On June 4, 2021, we delivered the first 120 boxes to six neighborhoods.
The following week, the number rose to 1,000. By the fourth week, we were distributing roughly 2,000 boxes a week.
As the operation grew, so did the problems.
One Monday morning, at 9:37, a message appeared in our working group: the rice scheduled for delivery might not arrive until the following week. More than 2,000 boxes were due to go out the next day. We spent much of that Monday coordinating with our catering partners, neighborhood chiefs, and delivery teams, much as we had been doing throughout the project. Tuesdays were our main distribution days. Messages and photos confirming deliveries began arriving in the morning and sometimes continued until seven or eight at night.
At the suggestion of neighborhood chiefs, we gradually expanded the distribution beyond schoolchildren and their families to include older people living alone and people with disabilities facing urgent difficulties.
Each box also included a small information card about food and agriculture.
We did not meet most of the families who received the food. Neighborhood chiefs and schools handled distribution, and we relied on their knowledge of local needs.
Over fourteen weeks, from June 4 to August 31, we delivered 24,222 boxes containing approximately 150,000 packages of prepared food, along with rice, noodles, and other supplies. They reached 55 neighborhoods and three schools in Taipei and New Taipei City.
In a reflection I wrote in 2021, I described the project with the Chinese expression you yong wu mou 有勇無謀—roughly, having plenty of courage and not nearly enough planning.
That was not entirely a joke.
We had no emergency food relief budget, no established distribution system, and no idea when the requests would stop growing. We started with 120 boxes and tried to keep up. Companies and individuals donated money. Farmers, fishers, and livestock producers contributed food. Other people helped with transportation and community contacts. School meal caterers who normally competed for contracts worked together to prepare the meals.
Still, donations did not always arrive as quickly as the bills. When the project ended, we were left with a funding shortfall of more than NT$3 million.
For an organization of our size, that was a serious problem. The following year, we made an additional request to longtime supporters and finally covered the deficit.
The last food boxes went out at the end of August 2021. The project was finished, but the financial work took longer.
And our regular work had not stopped.
5. Who Pays for All This?
The pandemic relief project was not our first experience of financial uncertainty. It was simply the most expensive.
Since Douceur Network was formally established in 2018, we have benefited from the trust and generosity of longtime supporters.
Our founding chair, Irene Chen Tsai, served for the organization's first two terms and has continued to support its development. That gives us a degree of stability, but it does not mean our annual budget is guaranteed.
Our general arrangement is that major supporters provide about one-third of the organization's funding. The secretariat must raise the other two-thirds.
That means writing proposals, approaching partners, applying for grants, negotiating corporate sponsorships, asking for donations, and bidding for projects—all while trying to carry out the work itself. Some proposals take months and lead nowhere. Others succeed, bringing with them a new set of deadlines, budgets, and reporting requirements. Government grants come with accounting and reporting requirements. Corporate partners have their own budgets and expectations. Even a successful proposal may not cover staff salaries or the ordinary costs of running an organization.
The Taiwan School Lunch Competition has relied primarily on funds we raise ourselves, with only limited government support. Every edition means finding sponsors again and working out how to preserve the prizes and professional learning opportunities we want to offer.
Television production is another challenge.
The first season of What's for Lunch? received a Golden Bell nomination, and we managed to produce two more seasons. But documentary production requires substantial money and personnel.
We submitted a proposal to Taiwan's Public Television Service. It was not selected.
Making one season does not mean the next season will pay for itself.
We have tried to retain the freedom to decide which problems matter to us and what projects we want to pursue. But the availability and conditions of funding affect what we can actually do.
Some projects move forward because the right partners come along. Others have to wait.
6. Across Borders, Through People
Our relationships with Japan's school lunch community began before Douceur Network was formally established.
Japan's National School Meal Koshien inspired our first competition. Later, winning teams traveled to Japan to visit schools and meet nutrition teachers, cooks, and other school meal professionals.
Over time, we made friends. Some arranged school visits. Others introduced us to colleagues. Some stayed in touch with Taiwanese nutritionists and cooks long after the visits were over.
In 2022, we launched a school lunch recipe exchange between Taiwan and Japan.
Three school nutrition professionals from each country participated in the first year. They exchanged recipes for food actually served in schools, not restaurant dishes or special-occasion menus.
Cooking another country's school lunch can be surprisingly difficult. Ingredients may be unavailable. Seasoning preferences differ. Kitchen equipment, serving numbers, and preparation times vary. Recipes have to be adjusted.
In 2023, partial funding from Taiwan’s Agriculture and Food Agency helped us continue the exchange, and South Korea joined the following year. By 2024, the program had grown to include 31 schools: thirteen in Taiwan, nine in Japan, and nine in South Korea.
Japanese schools tried Taiwanese dishes such as sticky rice and roasted chicken legs, while Taiwanese schools experimented with regional Japanese recipes. The results did not always look or taste quite like the originals, but that was part of the experience. Each school's nutritionists and cooks made their own adjustments, taking into account their students' preferences, kitchen facilities, and what they could realistically prepare.
Some of the relationships we developed through school meal exchanges eventually took us beyond school kitchens. In 2025 and 2026, we participated in Taiwan’s Youth Overseas Dream Fund program, arranging three-week learning experiences for Taiwanese young people with the Hiratsuka Fisheries Cooperative in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. There, they spent time with people working in the local fishing industry, learning about fisheries and food education firsthand.
Our work expanded into agriculture as well. In 2026, we collaborated with the Gunma Tourism, Local Products and International Association to arrange placements for five Taiwanese young people at GREEN LEAF, a company involved in farming, food processing, and regional development.
None of this was part of our plan when we organized the first school lunch competition. But the relationships continued beyond individual projects, and sometimes, a year or two later, someone would suggest something new and we would find ourselves working together again.
7. Where Might the Next Ten Years Begin?
When we organized the first Taiwan School Lunch Competition in 2018, our immediate concerns were rather straightforward: Could we put together a good competition? Could we give school nutritionists and cooks the recognition their work deserved? And could we help more parents, teachers, students, and the wider public recognize the importance of school meals?
We certainly did not imagine that this would lead us into television production, international exchanges, pandemic food relief, and eventually, discussions about the place of school meals within public education. In fact, we had much to learn before we could even begin asking some of those questions.
At the time, we recognized the importance of school nutritionists, but we still had much to learn about their work and their role in the education system. We knew little about the school meal laws in Japan and South Korea. What we had was an idea for a competition, a willingness to try, and the good fortune to meet people who knew far more about school meals than we did.
The competition became much more than an annual event. It gave us a reason to enter school kitchens, listen to nutritionists and cooks, and build relationships that continued long after the prizes had been awarded. Those relationships opened other doors. A professional visit to Japan eventually grew into wider exchanges. People we met through one project became collaborators in another. The stories we encountered in school kitchens led us toward documentary filmmaking, while partnerships with businesses and local communities allowed us to attempt work that bore little resemblance to a cooking competition.
None of this happened automatically. Much of our work took shape around the secretariat's meeting table, where ideas were questioned, revised, occasionally abandoned, and sometimes pursued despite considerable uncertainty. We learned that working across organizational boundaries requires more than introducing people to one another. Different partners have different responsibilities, resources, and ways of working. Finding a way forward can be slow and complicated, and the organization doing the coordinating does not always receive much appreciation for its efforts. Yet these difficult collaborations often make something genuinely new possible.
Our international school lunch recipe exchanges offer a particularly revealing example. When nutritionists in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea work with one another's recipes, they do not simply transfer knowledge from one country to another. Ingredients change, cooking methods are adapted, and familiar dishes are reconsidered in unfamiliar school kitchens. Those who share a recipe may learn as much from its adaptation as those who receive it.
The exchanges have also taken on lives beyond the projects themselves. Some experiences became cookbooks and food education publications. Japanese nutritionists went on to present their work with Taiwanese partners in professional journals and at national conferences. A Korean nutritionist, through a connection we helped establish, later collaborated with Professor Jeremy Rappleye on research into a different subject altogether. Jeremy, as it happens, also organized this WERA/TERA panel. The research was undertaken by the scholars themselves, but the collaboration grew out of an earlier connection.
After a while, it becomes rather difficult to say who was teaching whom.
The same is true of Douceur Network. We did not begin with a fully developed understanding of school meals and then spend the next ten years explaining it to others. Our understanding changed through the people we worked with and the situations we encountered. The more we learned about school nutritionists, cooks, food producers, and the systems supporting their work, the more we began to see school meals differently.
Our encounters with Japan and South Korea were especially important in this respect. Their histories and legal frameworks prompted us to look again at Taiwan's own school meal development, dating back to the 1950s. Gradually, we came to understand that school meals are not simply a service that happens to take place in schools. They are part of a larger question about the responsibilities of public education and how food policy, professional expertise, and public administration can help fulfill those responsibilities.
This does not make the quality of the meal any less important. Quite the opposite. Providing children with safe, nutritious, and appealing meals is part of taking that educational responsibility seriously. Food education cannot substitute for a good lunch.
Over these same ten years, the public conversation in Taiwan has also begun to change. School meals now attract attention from legislators across political parties, local governments, professional organizations, and the media. The possibility of national school meal legislation has become much more concrete. Yet greater attention does not mean that everyone agrees on what the system should become. The question of whether school meals should be understood as part of public education, rather than merely as a food service, is still being worked out.
We have participated in that conversation alongside many others. It would be misleading to claim that Douceur Network brought about these changes. It would be equally misleading to describe our ten years as though we had simply watched them happen. Our projects have created opportunities for people and ideas to meet, while those encounters have repeatedly changed our own questions, decisions, and work.
Not every attempt succeeded. Our first idea for distributing food through convenience stores during the pandemic did not work. Some projects demanded far more resources than we had anticipated. Others, including our television series, could not continue indefinitely despite everything they had accomplished. These experiences taught us something about the limits of enthusiasm, goodwill, and organizational ingenuity. There are things a small civil society organization can initiate but cannot sustain alone. And there are public responsibilities that should not depend on whether an NGO manages to find enough donors or willing partners.
All of which brings me back to the WERA/TERA conference in October 2026.
This was not our first international exchange. But most of the people we had worked with over the years were nutritionists, cooks, teachers, farmers, fishers, business partners, and community organizations. At this conference, I found myself among researchers who had spent years studying education systems, school life, food cultures, and the institutions that shape everyday experience.
Listening to the presentations, I found myself thinking about our own work from some different perspectives. I was curious where further conversations might lead.
I do not know what will come from these encounters. Perhaps a research collaboration, a joint interview, another exchange program, or simply an ongoing conversation. Ten years ago, we had no idea that a school lunch competition would lead us into so many other kinds of work, and I rather like the possibility that neither side has to be the designated teacher or student.
I have sometimes thought of Douceur Network as a little yeast. We do not own school kitchens, farms, or fishing ports, nor do we have a network of community service offices. The knowledge, skills, and resources needed for our projects belong to many different people. What we can do is bring an idea to the table, find people willing to try something together, and create opportunities for connections that might not otherwise have happened.
Of course, yeast alone cannot make bread. It needs other ingredients, a suitable environment, and people who know what they are doing. Even then, the result is not entirely predictable.