Betting on Bento Boxes

Sometimes I spend way too much time thinking about the next best thing. That can be either good or bad. Sometimes it does keep your mind on the lookout for ideas though. And just sometimes, it pays off.

I have been agonizing over ways to make healthy food options just a little bit more appealing to the younger set in the family. Even though I'm down to only just one little person who needs direction in this department, she needs it the most. I stumbled across Primal Kitchen where they do a wonderful job of blogging about the paleo/primal/whole foods approach they take to kids lunches. There are some great ideas there. And the most inspiring I think is the fact that they are using bento boxes to package up the offerings and make them unnumerably more interesting to little diners.

Further research led me to find Laptop Lunch's Bento Buddies which are very cool modular, lidded bento boxes. As well I tracked down Lunch Bots stainless bento lunch containers. Without a budget to stick to, I'd take either one of those for H-Bob in a heart beat. But until I make such a purchase, I decided to do the next best thing and use some silicone cupcake liners that I had which fit perfectly into a lidded container. This doesn't make a very packable option as nothing is lidded, but it did provide a low cost introduction to breakfast and lunch presented in a more fun manner.

 

Just for fun I decided to see what the library had to offer in this realm and found The Just Bento Cookbook - Everyday Lunches To Go by Makiko Itoh who also blogs at Just Bento which provided a lot of visual inspiration as to what I could adapt to our whole foods/primal food approach. And as usual, another great source for bento lunch ideas I found was on Pinterest. More visuals there to delight the eye and inspire for sure.

Perhaps packing a lunch for a stay-at-home child would become just as bothersome as doing the same for my high schooler who has chosen to take lunches in order to have enough healthy foods to fuel his athletic needs. But on the other hand, I could set aside portions for her just as easily while tackling his lunch demands.

So my final take is that I plan on keeping my eyes open when school lunch boxes start to show up on the retail shelves this summer to look for something that might work, and most importantly, is BPA free. I tend to worry about some of the cheap, imported plastics that find our way into the food supply. Until then, we will experiment with my make-do bento box and see where that takes us. Based on today's enthusiastic response to breakfast that we needed to take on the go, we just might be on the right track.

Do you have healthy, whole food lunch dilemmas for either children at home or on the go? What's your favorite and most successful way to deal with them?