Bento Box Lunches

Warning: long blog post ahead...

One of my desires is to live, shop and eat more responsibly and ethically. I am attracted to the concept of buying foods as locally as possible, and eating organic fruits and vegetables in their appropriate seasons. I also would love to decrease our use of disposable, unhealthy food packaging materials. This is not an easy shift to make, and I am making slow changes towards these goals.

The lunches that I was packing for my daughters (and my husband and I when we are working), have really bugged me in how much they missed the mark. We were not eating to the nutritional standards that I would hope for, and we were using an excessive amount of disposable packaging.

Then this summer I stumbled onto blogs and pictures of bento box lunches, and I am hooked. As best I understand it, bento lunch culture has developed in Japan into a basic standard for packing healthy lunches in attractive, appealing ways. The resources I have found encourage adapting these standards to our own, usually American-style, cuisine. I now find lunch making fun and creative, which makes the work involved much more satisfying.

So what am I doing different? I have purchased a few different types of plastic lunch containers (bento boxes), which I now use to pack our lunches. A Japanese $1.50 store called “Daiso” opened near me this summer, so I was able to purchase a few lunch boxes there very inexpensively (like these).

I also love my new lock & lock boxes from Target. They aren’t quite as cute as the other bento boxes but are very versatile (and the Target price was much better than what’s listed at the website I linked to).

I have not adapted to the bento practice of cooking hot food, letting it cool to room temperature in a bento box, then packing it up and eating it at room temperature three or four hours later. Evidently there is a whole body of knowledge developed in Japan around how to do this safely, but I am not comfortable with the practice – I still pack either cold foods in our bento boxes, or hot foods into little thermoses (we use these Nissan thermoses, they are truly dishwasher safe and very durable).

My favorite bento blog is Lunch in a Box. The author has put together a wonderful resource of ideas, techniques and supplies for bento lunches. Her blog is my main inspiration. I’ll try to put together a list of links of other blogs and resources that are inspiring me another day.

Most days, I am packing lunches for my daughters with usually either a rolled tortilla-type flatbread sandwich and a selection of fruits and vegetables, or I am putting some hot leftovers in a thermos and packing a small box of fruits and vegetables. When my husband needs a lunch, I am packing a lock & lock box with half chicken salad and half lettuce that he can mix together when he eats. I also sometimes make potato or pasta salads for protein and carbs. I send these lunches to school in lunch boxes with ice packs.

My daughters think that my obsession with the cuteness of the bento lunches and accessories is a little crazy – they do not share my love of “cute”, and will not consciously eat any differently just because mom put it into a cute box! What I have found, though, is that the natural influence of well-presented food is changing the way they are eating.

A typical lunch that I made last year would have included a small thermos of leftover spaghetti, and plastic sandwich bags with some baby carrots and some fruit, and maybe a couple of cookies. They usually would eat the spaghetti and cookies, most of the fruit and maybe one or two carrots. I was continually stressed at the amount of food that we wasted, as well as how many plastic sandwich bags we used up and threw out.

Now I will pack almost the same foods, but - inspired by the pictures of bento lunches that I have seen – I might use one layer of our two-tier boxes to pack maybe 5 or 6 baby carrots, a few slices of apple (dipped in diluted lime juice & honey to keep from turning), and 3 strawberries to go with the spaghetti or sandwich. Somehow, when they are presented with the food in this manner, they eat it all. I have almost dropped the practice of including cookies, and now give them very small reusable plastic containers containing a few xylitol mints to chew, which are possibly (according to some claims) quite good for their teeth.

Wow, I didn’t think that it would take that long just to write an intro to my bento obsession. I want to confess that we still have a long way to go towards really reducing our use of one-time disposable packaging. I still buy prepackaged snacks for the girls to pick for their snack recess, and we use disposable packaged drinks. I still purchase too many overly-packaged foods to begin with. But we are making small steps toward our ideals, we are eating a little healthier, and I am enjoying packing the lunches a lot more than I did before. I do need to work more consciously on streamlining my planning and preparation for lunches, to keep the time spent to a doable minimum – but it’s a fun challenge.