Okay, so bento are becoming more of a thing in the US as we move away from brown bagging it.* To that end, Rubbermaid has come out with some containers called LunchBlox. The one to the right is the sandwich version, but they made a salad-style one and another that’s flat and meant to fit into tall insulated lunch bags.
I do like the idea and think it’s cool that they’re being made. I’m all about bringing your own lunch to work or school, reducing waste with reusable containers and all that smack. And hey, bento is my hobby, so of course portable meal containers are going to be of interest to me.
I’m also not going to buy it.
I’ve been eyeing these damn things for months, contemplating getting one. What finally decided me was a comment I made when I was examining the little containers (stop laughing at me, it’s no worse than stamp collecting) on shopping trip yesterday. I was examining one, and my husband asked me when I was going to stop doing this every week or so and buy the darn thing.
“I want one. Thing is, if I buy it, I’ll use it twice, then go back to my usual bento box. They don’t fit in my laptop tote and wouldn’t fit in a purse, either.”
They have a volume capacity of nearly twice my usual bento –4.5 c to the 2.5c capacity of the bento. (1135ml to 591ml). Sure, if you’re going to have a sandwich for lunch, you’re going to want that. Bread is fluffy and isn’t well suited to the small-capacity bento boxes I use. Salad? Yep, lettuce takes up a lot of room.
But for me, part of the whole appeal of bento is that it is a small, filling meal that doesn’t take up much space. It’s not even necessarily a fascination with Japanese food. I mean, I love rice and all, and onigiri are delicious, but the example of a bento I’m using here is actually has two muffin tin Shepherd’s Pies. The tiers stack on top of each other and are about six inches by three inches when wrapped up to be tossed into a tote or purse.
So, while I applaud the idea that the bento concept is becoming popular in the US, I am still going to be using my more compact containers.
* I can’t recall ever putting a lunch in a brown bag unless we were on a field trip. It was considered wasteful when lunch boxes served perfectly well. Was that more of a thing than I knew?
I use rubbermaid tupperwares, but mine are individual ones where the lid from one snaps to the bottom of the next one, more like an actual bento box
There was a period of time when lunchboxes were pretty much cute kid toys or huge tins, then came the Tupperware style and eventually soft sided coolers.
But for a couple of decades, most public school kids by about 5th or 6th grade only used brown paper bags because the other choices weren’t ‘cool’.
Looked ‘dorky’.
And my memory of store and office fridge contents in the 90’s and later was that women mostly brought Tupperware styles and guys mostly brought paper bags.
That seems to have shifted though, and I see more soft side cooler styles and a lot fewer paper bags, even at the schools.