Bento

Tired of protein bars, the 3-4 different salads offered at the cafeteria at work, and the odd can of Progresso soup tossed into my briefcase with an apple, I decided to start putting a little more effort into lunch. As is usual for me, my call to action involved a few kicks in the pants sources of inspiration.


I was inspired a bit by The Gospel of Food by Barry Glassner. According to Glassner, a study of people eating food they liked and food they didn’t like had some interesting results: people absorbed less iron when they didn’t like their food, and absorbed significantly more iron when they did like their food. This got my attention. Always worried about weight, I don’t like my food much a lot of the time; I’m eating what I think I can have rather than what I would like to have. And, I have to admit that I don’t put much effort into my food since it’s often not what I’d really like to eat. Hence, the protein bars and my friends referring to my usual diet as “Perpetual Lent.” I’m chronically anemic and can’t seem to absorb iron no matter what I do, so any talk about iron absorption is going to get my ears to prick up. And, I hate my iron pills. The smell of them makes me gag, now, after several years of taking massive doses of them and subsequently having gastric issues. (I’m wondering now if hating them so much is interfering with being able to absorb them…)

I guess I could try eating some of the other food at the cafeteria, but I don’t trust the guy who runs it. He’s a nice enough guy, an Italian New York transplant with a lot of restaurant experience, and the food he makes is really good. But, I’ve caught him selling “Atkins Friendly Wraps” that are made with regular tortillas (I know because I’ve ordered one and seen the tortilla being taken from a regular tortilla package) and he tells people that his mayonnaise is low-fat, and I’ve seen the sandwich maker refreshing the mayonnaise from an industrial-sized jar of regular Best Foods. A lot of the cafeteria food is breaded and etc., too, which is not great, and a couple of years ago I lost 11 pounds doing nothing but stopping eating lunch in the cafeteria.

I was reading A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter, and loved the description of Elnora’s lunch box and all the goodies her mother and Maggie packed into it. I started looking around at different styles of lunch boxes, looking for a modern equivalent, and stumbled upon Bento boxes. They are cool.

Bento is a Japanese style of food presentation in which food is served in a box, or stacking boxes, with different compartments. Imagine that! Instead of a can of soup or a protein bar, I can have a lunch with several small courses. That’s very cool.

So far, I’ve taken lunch every day for a week, and liked it. I’m really enjoying my lunches, which have been accompanied by an interesting feeling of well-being. This is probably some artifact of earliest childhood, but I feel kind of loved knowing a nice lunch with freshly prepared, interesting food is waiting for me. I haven’t wanted to snack between breakfast and lunch, and that’s saying a lot considering that it’s after the holidays and everyone at work is bringing in all their post-holiday leftover crap to get it out of the house so they don’t eat it. There’s a definite psychological effect, too, to opening the box and seeing the little boxes there filled with good stuff. It feels special, even though it’s still healthy stuff and I know what’s in there because I packed it myself, and some of it is leftovers. I’m definitely enjoying my lunch, and hopefully absorbing iron!

I have been a little adventurous. I cut the ends off cucumbers and hollowed them out, and filled them with tuna salad. That was interesting and cool. I threw some diced pear and minced pecan into some Greek yogurt and drizzled honey across the top. Both of those experiments were very tasty.

This is my lunch from earlier in the week. Clockwise from the bottom left: leftover Cock-a-Leekie Soup, tuna salad on shredded romaine lettuce, sliced red and green peppers, and fresh pineapple. I left the small dip container out of this lunch because I didn’t need it. The soup and pineapple are in the lidded containers, with the lids removed for the photo. It really is nice to open the box and see a decent lunch, and everything stayed put. Because of the containers and the snug lid on the outer box, everything was pretty much where I placed it when I made the lunch—no wayward bits wandering into other dishes, no bunched-up salad with the tuna at one end and the lettuce at the other.