Japanese Bento

Being a hard working designer, marketer, business owner and general B2B guru (hmm) takes its toll on a man. Having just finished my favourite lunch and promised myself I’d write another blog post this afternoon, I couldn’t help putting the two of them together. I am a big fan of Japanese Bento. Not just because it is delicious, nutritious and there is a great place close to the office, but because I feel like I am going to my own private design show when I have it for lunch.

For those who don’t know Bento means a small convenient meal. It’s not sushi where you can take what you fancy from the conveyor belt, it comes arranged perfectly in a small box. Think of it as a Japanese packed lunch. It has long been a feature of Japanese life.  Much like the UK, people who travelled or spent all day working in the fields would want to take a good, solid meal with them to eat when they got hungry. Instead of a Cornish Pasty or a cheese sandwich, a la Blighty, the Japanese took a Bento box. Often the boxes themselves were highly decorated works of art nowadays, especially in the West, they are cardboard throw aways.

Half the fun of Bento is how it looks. The Japanese place a great deal of importance on the presentation of their food. The aesthetic has to be just right and incredibly pleasing to the eye. Often foods are cut or shaped to look like something else for novelty value. Traditionally it would be the role of the person – usually the woman – making the evening meal the night before to prepare the Bento for the family the next day. Key to this was ensuring that they selected ingredients that were going to last. Bento is still a big part of modern Japan, however with women moving out of the home and into the workplace, there has been a boom in ready-made Bento.

The Japanese are fastidious when it comes to food. That’s what makes Bento so interesting for me. It makes me look at the food not just in terms of what I am eating but in terms of how it is constructed and, most importantly, how it is designed. My designers’ eye is drawn to the art that the food had cleverly concealed itself as. Looking at the Bento that is eaten in Japan it almost reflects the national character. Amongst the beautiful artistic Bentos are the Manga, Hello Kitty or Super Mario ones. Intricate boxes stuffed with edible art – it seems a shame to eat them.

The upside of admiring the art and design in a Bento box is you get to eat the Bento afterwards, which is precisely what I did.