AIBU to hope Bento boxes for packed school lunches never take off here?

[LightDrizzle]

Luckily I’m an old bat and it wouldn’t directly affect me but while it’s a Japanese thing that is sort of cute at a distance, the thought of parents, and let’s face it, mostly women, thinking they have to put mental and physical effort into carving Squishmallows out of radishes and creating beautiful and imaginative Bento boxes every day for the delight of their children and the envy of their friends just makes me feel depressed.

It was bad enough in the days of cutting sandwiches and bunging a satsuma, a Mini Babybel and a Penguin in. I’m still surprised at how long it takes to make rounds of decent sandwiches. I loathed doing packed lunches on top of everything else you’ve got to do with young children and full time work. Obviously there is nothing wrong with the Bento box as a receptacle, it’s the Insta-culture expectation as to the contents that make me feel sympathetic dread. Sometimes it seems that as fast as we develop labour saving gadgets and devices; social media and influencers devise tortuous new ways of parting women from any prospect of a moment to theirselves.

My DC are now 25 and 21 and had Sistema bento boxes for packed lunch. They were great for stopping things getting squished together. No faff, just chuck it in. (I will confess to the occasional star- or heart-shaped sandwich when they were very little).

We still have one left that I occasionally use when I need a packed lunch.

Food is my love language and it genuinely brings me joy to make lunches that make my kids smile.

DS (age 3) gets sandwich’s in shapes with cookie cutters, vegetable rounds cut with a cutter, little picks in his fruit.
my big kids get a joke in their box and often non sandwich alternatives. Today they have bagels cut in to little rounds toasted in the air fryer with rounds of ham and cheese to resemble a lunchable and a tiny squeezey bottle for sauce.

It makes all of us smile and takes potentially 2/3 minutes longer than a standard lunch

its simple. Don’t go on Instagram/facebook/tikto whatever it is and you won’t know about these silly things, therefore you won’t care.

Both mine have used a Yumbox since creche. I have one too for my lunch. They have used the same ones for about 3 years now.

I peel oranges and cut up apples and put a sandwich etc in the other section. They only have ten mins to eat at big lunch so it's much quicker .
And we do have the little animal forks

I'm with you. BUT school dinners at DS' school are £3.20 a day and the food is not great.

I love a bento box for the compartments. None of the other fancy stuff, just for practicality.

I remember packed lunches at school- cheese spread all over my Trio bar, wet sandwiches where they had been snuggled up next to cucumber slices, apples with fluff on from the depths of my school bag. My kids have a neatly packed bento box (as do I for my work lunches) and it makes life so much more pleasant.

I've never shaped my cucumber slices though!

Many kids where I work in the UK have these. I think they're awful:

A. The WASTE. Sandwiches cut into stars etc. The other day one child had apple slices, peeled and then cut into rabbits! Cucumbers cut into teddies etc. I'm assuming that much of the waste is chucked out eaten by mum who probably doesn't need to eat it so it's still waste.

B. The TIME and effort it must take, better spent playing with your child or talking to them.

C. The choice. It's ridiculous and overwhelming for a 3 year old.

D. Guess what they will eat first when it's all presented at once? The marshmallows, the chocolate buttons, the crisps, the tiny cupcake. Are those star shaped sarnies or rabbit shaped applesgoing to get eaten? Unlikely. When kids have a normal lunchbox we can just say sandwiches/ pasta/rice etc and fruit need to get eaten first but when it is all open at once they will pick at what they want. And our brain/ taste buds are pre-programmed to enjoy the sweet/ fat stuff.

One of my dds uses a bento box, usually takes leftovers in it as she doesn’t like sandwiches.
She’s packed her own lunch since year 4. I would say a bento box make it easier for her to organise her lunch

My dc we're taking them 15 years ago. But no radish carving! Rice or couscous, protein of some description, pickled veg, fruit for the one who ate it, mini muffin (made batch each weekend). Easier than sandwiches as essentially it was leftovers!

Oh and the pickled veg was homemade but I did 2 weeks worth at a time, they actually put them together themselves at secondary, dd2 would even make mine.

Bento boxes alone are brilliant.

The ridiculous lunches in a Bento box that are all over SM can get in the bin. I saw one the other day where the sandwich had been cut into the shape of a school bus (complete with olive wheels and little passengers!) with the cheese on the outside of the bread to make it yellow, a cookie that was taken apart and then decorated to look like a clock and a variety of vegetables that had been cut out/filled back in with other vegetables. Who has time for that?!

This! I never gave ds an option.

DD is in primary and has a packed lunch. She’s fussy though so it’s something basic like a ham wrap, yogurt, drink and a snack…not that I do it anyway, DH does it whilst he’s cooking tea.

My kids have bento style boxes for packed lunch. I pack them a sandwich or a wrap (the savoury) some fruit a vegetable something crunchy and something sweet.

it’s not all artsy and beautiful. It’s just everything ina. Seperate compartment.

Someone on my local fb group does amazing stuff like this, I agree who has the time but she seems to really enjoy it and her LO must be delighted. Wish I had the time, skill and inclination!

YABU

I used to live in Asia and I had this really cute panda shape cutter. You squished rice inside, and put a seaweed sheet on top and pressed it down.

Hey presto a smiley panda. My DC loved it.

🤣🤣🤣 yep I remember all that!! So many hours wasted on those recipes. I particularly remember the 'tip' about 'sneaking' grated carrot into a grated cheese sandwich and my very cross reception age ds1 coming running off the bus in the afternoon, saying why did you put carrots in my sandwich?! I gave up then.

It’s hardly a new fad, they were a thing when I was a child.

What seems to be a new fad is for things that people don’t like, don’t agree with, or are slightly jealous of, are sneeringly labelled ‘only doing it for the instagram’. It seems to be the insult of the moment on here!!

I really can’t understand why parents can’t just cream off a bit of their dinner from the night before and put it in a thermos for their DC for the next day.

When we had to send packed lunches during Covid I got loads of comments about my DC’s food which was something hot. I didn’t get up at 0500 to make it. I just took aside a big if lasagna/ curry/ whatever we had the night before and shoved it in the microwave for a couple of minutes in the morning.

thanks @GreenTeaLikesMe , that sounds much more measured.

I like the idea of bento but it takes me a surprisingly long time to make a normal sandwich based lunch, so no chance am I doing all that. The notes look American to me, the little toothpicks with eyes or fake leaves look like exactly the thing that breaks dishwashers.

I love the sistema bento box. There's nothing bento about it though, it's completely designed round a typical UK packed lunch. Compartments for a sandwich, a whole apple and a yoghurt or stuff chopped up. Perfect.

my kids are early 20s and always had bento boxes for school- no faffing around with cutting things into fancy shapes though.

I don't think the problem is bento boxes. I think the problem is social media.

Surely everyone saying that it's just an easy way of doing packed lunch is missing the point? OP was clearly talking about the insta worthy bento boxes that are all over the place rather than the actual container.

Don't go on Insta.

I think people are slightly misunderstanding the OP. I'm guessing very few posters produce these sort of bento boxes.....