| Thinking Inside the Box |
 |
 |
| Tuesday, 01 March 2011 00:04 | ||||||||||||
 Japanese bento boxes - serve up beauty, creativity and nourishment By Bruce Rutledge(Top Photo : A classic “character bento” photographed by Christopher D. Salyers, author of Face Food: The Visual Creativity of Japanese Bento Boxes.) Martin Metke takes a bento to work just about every day. “I thought I’d be teased,” says the Seattle IT worker. “I thought people would say, ‘What, don’t you have any money?’” Instead, a co-worker noticed how delicious the lunch looked and offered to pay Metke’s wife to make an extra one.The bento has been part of the Japanese diet for centuries. It is served at formal occasions, carried to lunch by students and sold at just about every major train station in the country. While a traditional bento would have white rice with a pickled plum (umeboshi) in the middle and different sections of fish, meats and vegetables, in truth, just about anything goes, including elaborate “character bentos” that depict beloved anime or manga characters and are, some say, an elaborate ploy to trick children into eating their vegetables. There’s no question that a bento is more aesthetically pleasing and typically more nutritious than your average brown bag lunch. Metke says unwrapping his bento at lunch time is “like getting a Christmas present every day.” But bentos are only for those who have the time, dedication and big budget to make them, right? Not so, says Noriko Nishimura, Metke’s wife. She says it takes her 30 minutes or less to make the bentos each morning, and it’s not expensive at all. “I don’t spend much on food,” she says.In fact, making a bento every day for lunch saves the couple money since they don’t go out to eat. Nishimura doesn’t start from scratch every morning, either. She usually includes some pickled or marinated food that has been prepared ahead of time. She also doesn’t stick strictly to Japanese ingredients. “I use Japanese food as much as possible, but I sometimes use roasted or pickled beets, for example.” Makiko Itoh, author of The Just Bento Cookbook and a popular blogger at justbento.com, stretches the definition of bento even further. She lived in Switzerland for 15 years and learned that “Japanese ingredients are not practical all the time, so I create European-style bentos as well.” Interest in bentos seems to have spread across the globe. Itoh says her English-language blog has 393,000 subscribers, and she hears from readers all over the world. “I’ve heard from a group in the U.K. using bentos (to overcome) eating disorders, from a parent who uses bento for an autistic son, all kinds of people.” She also says that most of the bentos she makes are vegetarian or vegan. Itoh and Nishimura both say that preparation is key. “We Japanese are encouraged to eat 30 different ingredients a day,” Nishimura says. “I try to include as many ingredients as possible, as much flavor as possible and as much color as possible. That’s the idea behind bento.”
|
||||||||||||
| Last Updated on Saturday, 09 April 2011 10:51 |
