Meet Mr. Bento!
18Jan2006 Filed under: Product Placement
Meet Mr. Bento!, originally uploaded by .Ariel.
Those of you who were around during Dre and my month-long cleanse a few years ago may not be surprised by this. The rest of you may think I’m a freak (or, at least, more so than you usually do). But I’m currently obsessed with a Japanese lunchbox called Mr. Bento.
Mr. Bento is basically a big fat thermos that holds four little specialty tupperware containers inside it. It also comes with its own special bag. If you’re curious about it you can go to Amazon, or you can check out this guy’s Flickr set, which is basically a photographic tour of Mr. Bento’s guts.
Dre and my longstanding joke is that I can’t really cook food — but I’m really good at arranging it. Witness Exhibits 1, 2, and 3. I’m actually getting better about cooking — I would say I cook a third of the dinners in the house now, which is major progress when compared to my former levels of cooking 0% and desperately lapping up bowls of cereal when Andreas wasn’t home.
Mr. Bento perfectly caters to my food arranging fetish, and I’m all atwitter about the beautiful lunches I can build in his four containers. I’ve been bringing lunch from home more often (goes with the cooking more often thing — there are leftovers!) and saving a decent amount of money, but I have this ugly bag of mismatched tupperware that rattles around and oh, the obsessive compulsive in me just purrs at the thought of Mr. Bento’s logic of “a place for everything! and everything in its place!” As a child, I used to collect little boxes and containers. I never had anything to put in them, but oh, how I love little places for things.
And now, little places for my lunch!
To celebrate this burgeoning obsession with what is for all intents and purposes a lunch box, I’m launching Mr. Bento Porn, a Flickr group documenting obsessive Mr. Bento usage. And if you’re interested in joining in on the fun, I can enable that, too. Go here. Then upload your Mr. Bento porn to Flickr and tag it “Mr Bento.” Then we’ll enjoy Mr. Bento porn together.
UPDATE: The Mr. Bento Porn Flickr group is kicking ass! Over one thousand photos of awesome Mr. Bento lunches.
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10 Responses to “Meet Mr. Bento!”
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Hey there. I'm Ariel Meadow Stallings, a native Seattleite who's written my way up and down the Left Coast. Electrolicious is where I post daily randomata, but I also write for a living. My first book, Offbeat Bride, was published last year.
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oze
January 19th, 2006 at 5:52 am
Oh dear lord! My ultimate nightmare has come true. Mr. Bento is evil in thermos form.
helenjane
January 19th, 2006 at 10:08 am
I got one for Christmas! All hail Mr. Bento!
Ivy
January 19th, 2006 at 10:15 am
OMG! That looks so yummy it’s like lunch porn. Why am I emotionally incapable of packing a lunch?
Esther
January 19th, 2006 at 10:45 am
Have you read any of the celebrity-chef type stuff, like Kitchen Confidential? from what I understand about cooking, presentation is a good 1/3 of the final product. (Anthony Bourdain has lengthy chapters on how to easily arrange those perfect little towers of exquisite layers.) I think good ingredients is another 1/3. So maybe you’re closer to being a good cook than you think
amy.leblanc
January 19th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
oh that is SO AWESOME and i want one. NOW. and i know the PERFECT person who needs one as a going away gift.
i am also extremely good at food arranging but not at food cooking. hence my fairly raw/chopped food diet. it usually tastes better raw then when i try to cook things.
Jason
January 20th, 2006 at 7:52 am
Wonderful! You’re making me want to bust out my dusty bento boxes. Mizuko Ito moblogged her bento creations for a couple of years: http://mito.typepad.com/photos/bento
MishMish
January 21st, 2006 at 8:18 pm
I’ve blogged the statement before that I secretly long to be the most organized person in the world - it’s my OCD side - I haven’t made it there yet, but oh how Mr. Bento would help my progress!!! Thanks for sharing!
Russell
March 10th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Did you get it in Seattle? If so, uwajimaya, or someplace else? I’m thinking I need one of those. I’ve had food leak one too many times in my backpack while I’m commuting.
Lily
May 4th, 2006 at 7:17 am
ARE YOU FRICKING KIDDING ME? i want one. NOW.
Deb
May 6th, 2006 at 12:39 am
Just got the Thermos Nissan one (JLN 1400X) that’s pretty much identical to the Mr. Bento, except it’s stainless steel, has a strap instead of a carry bag, and substitutes a spoon in attachable carry case instead of the chopsticks (kids’ chopsticks can fit in the spoon case, though). Conainers are all the same sizes and have the same seals. Upside: the Nissan one was considerably cheaper than the Mr. Bento (I got it for $31 in San Francisco). Hadn’t heard of the Nissan one before I saw it and all of the Mr/Ms. Bentos in the same store. Saw some cheap ones on eBay and Amazon.