Bento? Get Bent.

I've never heard of Bento before until I stumbled on this article from Parenting.com. In Japan, Bento is a single portion meal arranged in a box shaped container, that can also be elaborately designed to look like animals, flowers, cartoon characters, etc. It's a cool idea and beautiful to look at, but come on...who has this kind of time?

Take me, for example, who at ten o'clock at night exclaims "Shit! I forgot to make lunch for tomorrow!" Cut to the next morning when I'm throwing an entire package of turkey and a jar of mustard into a plastic bag to be assembled later at the office. Even harder to imagine is making one of these for each of your kids to take to school. Even if I was a stay at home mom, I think that by the end of the day, when the kids are finally in bed, I will have better things to do than stand in the kitchen shaping a slice of cheese into a lion's head and baby birds out of...of....whatever the heck that is. Mozzarella?

In conclusion, I will never make these because:

 a) I like to enjoy a wee bit of time to myself in the evening, and

 b) As a kid I remember my lunch ending up at the bottom of my backpack underneath 15 lbs of textbooks.