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Posted Nov. 28, 2014

Grown-Up Student Lunches: The Bento Box

For most, eating as a post-graduate is basically like eating in the 1970s except with more guilty Nando’s trips. With no real money for food, and no real time to cook the small amount you can afford, the average postgrad lives mostly on carbs, cheap meat and even cheaper wine. Just add huge sideburns and moustaches and you’d basically be in a kitchen sink drama circa 1974.

However, there is a whole world of great food out there that doesn’t cost much more than the frozen pizzas and rice that are the national cuisines of Studentville. This is particularly true of lunches on library days. Never has a meal needed to deliver so much and yet offered so little. Whilst studying, you need food that is healthy and will keep you alert, but that also offers you a sugary incentive to get you through the three o’clock lull. And the two o’clock lull. In fact, it needs to defeat the constant voice telling you to go on Instagram rather than read any more Derrida. Yesterday’s leftovers, sandwiches made when you were still half-asleep and bags of Doritos the size of a small child just aren’t going to do that for you. Throw those packets of wafer-thin, water-logged ham in the bin and try a bento box instead.

Bento, a Japanese word that means ‘delicious pick and mix box for getting rid of workday blues with rice balls shaped like animals’ (probably), is the lunchtime staple of Japan. In their home country, they are either made at home or bought anywhere from restaurants to department stores, and usually feature meat, fish or tofu with rice and cooked or pickled vegetables, each served in their own compartment. From this already delicious basis, some ingenious things are done, with dishes built to resemble popular characters (kyaraben) or other images, be they landscapes, animals or flowers (oekakiben). And if a ball of rice cooked to look like a panda doesn’t bring sufficient joy to your studying day, then I really don’t know what will.

If tofu shaped like Pikachu isn’t enough for you (aka you have no soul), bento boxes are also pretty much the healthiest lunch you can eat. The World Health Organisation and United Nations both report that Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world which hovers around the mid eighties, and looking at the elements of a bento box it’s not hard to see why. They offer a balanced meal with fresh ingredients free of additives, and the fact that they come in compartmentalised boxes mean that portion control comes built in. Plus, many of the staples of the bento box are some of the best superfood out there. Edamame beans, for example, are the only vegetable to contain all nine amino acids, and are also a complete protein in their own right.

Not only are they super healthy and super attractive, it is also an incredibly cheap way to eat well. Although some of the more specialist ingredients can be pricy, especially if you want to make your own sushi, Japanese food in general is based around a solid group of ingredients that all can be bought cheaply. With a little amount of tuna, some spring onions, soy sauce, rice and a chili, you already have everything you need to fill 90% of a bento box, all bought for under a fiver and providing you at least a week’s worth of lunches far tastier than your sorry excuse for a sandwich made entirely of white label foodstuffs. Before you know it, lunch just won’t be the same unless it’s sculpted to look like the cast of ‘Spirited Away’.

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