Thinking Outside the Lunch Box

Now that school is in full swing, my kids' backpacks are just beginning to be burdened by 30 tons of books and paperwork, and the novelty of eating their lunch out of a paper bag is beginning to lose some of its blush.  

In fact, one week into the new school year, I've already been given a litany of items that shouldn't be packed in the aforementioned bag, because, a) it gets mushy, b) it doesn't taste good, c) no one else's mom packs that in their lunch.  

The mushy part I get, after all, who in my household can forget the "Great Banana/Backpack Debacle," spring of 2011. Not only did the offending fruit ultimately manage to completely cover the interior of my middle schoolers backpack, including about $100 worth of textbooks, but it was left in there so long, its carcass petrified and managed to spawn life on the pages of my kid's band book. And here I thought I was being a good mom by giving my child fruit for lunch. Clearly, I need to do a backpack check more often.

In my search to build a better lunch, I came across the lovely people at Laptoplunches.com. These folks take lunchtime to an entirely different level, and they even have an army of Bento Box devotees who chronicle on a daily basis efforts of their creativity. For the uninitiated, a Bento, according to Wikipedia, is "a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese Cuisine."  

And in the spirit of cultural appropriation, industrious folks across America have embraced the idea of the Bento. Make food fun, and colorful...and not touching.

One of the nice aspects of packing a Bento lunch is that it is environmentally friendly. With no packing waste in your child's backpack, they bring the box and its cute little cubbies home each day, and they don't leave a trail of zip lock baggies and crumpled brown bags in their wake.  

The folks at Laptoplunches.com are the masters at helping you get started. When you purchase your starter kit, it comes with a wonderful guidebook that gets you on your way, detailing the benefits of living the Bento lifestyle, so you can prepare healthy lunches devoid of prepackaged and processed foodstuffs. If veggies are cut into cute little shapes, the kids might actually eat them.

Further research showed that there seems to be Internet "bento-cults" where you can Bento to your heart's desire and literally find any fun food theme you'd like. There are egg molds to shape hard boiled eggs into bunnies and fish, fruit and veggie cutters and more themed food picks than I have space to write about.  

If you find all the Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma Bear paraphernalia to cutesy for your aesthetic taste, you can buy a Bento Box shaped like the space shuttle and get yourself an R2-D2 soy sauce bottle. If you have a serious amount of time to kill, you might want to try and make Bento lunches for your kids that look like this, guaranteed to make them eat their food but will put a serious damper on your morning and may send you to therapy. What kid wouldn't want to eat blue rice or a sandwich that looked like Spongebob Squarepants.

Like most things, it takes time to make food fun, a lot of time, so start small and, remember, the sky's is the limit.