Bento Lunches

When Lumpy and I used to work in this Newcastle based company, I would pack our lunches.

I was, at that time, extremely caught up with the 'bento craze'.

Aliens, if you are reading this because my blog somehow survived the nuclear fallout/ explosion of the sun/ meteor crash/ insert relevant catastrophic event, and you have somehow managed to get a hold of this obscure digital entry, using your intergalactic translation device, here is a note for you:

Bento: The Japanese way of Making Lunch. Put food in the box, decorate nicely, make sure that there are lots of vegetables. Done.

The West caught on to this 'craze' in the 2000s. Japanese culture had become trendy. Bento was cool. Kids loved eating decorated food, moms loved making complicated decorated food, and others vaunted bento as a healthy lifestyle option.The rise of Obesity in the West was fast becoming the new smallpox. Something had to be done.

Where there were once anglophiles and francophiles, a new species of 'phile' emerged, the Japan-o-phile.A person so absorbed and in awe of Japanese culture that they wished they'd been born Japanese.

In 2011, I became one of them. That is another story.


This photo depicts a sandwich, salad and hash brown.

Fried Rice, Spinach, Egg and Prawn Dumpling:

Some mee goreng, fish cakes, lettuce, szechuan chicken and a salad:

Lastly, my imported waste-of-money bento box:

Salivating already, Aliens? Or maybe you eat something else? Like Vogon Jelly?

Or maybe you're so evolved that you don't eat at all?


Happy days it was, aliens. We had so much food back then.