My Life in Tokyo

I would never make it as a Japanese mother. During my Japanese lesson this morning, as lunch time approached, I mentioned I was getting hungry. My teacher said that she was hungry too, as she gets up at 5:30 every morning to make her daughter’s lunch for school. I asked what she made today. Here’s what she described:

pork, cooked with onions and spices;
broccoli;
weiners and beans.

I asked her, did she make all of this fresh today, from scratch? Yes, she said. Do you do this every morning, I asked? Yes.

Wow. I’m a failure at lunchboxes.

After a few weeks of packing sandwiches in Isabella’s old lunchbox, we got her a kid’s bento box lunch set. Hers is a Hello Kitty set that has two stacking plastic boxes, one with a divider. I used to pack her a whole piece of fruit; now, she tells me I’m supposed to cut it up into small pieces and give her a little pick to eat it with. Today I gave her a hard-boiled egg, so I peeled it and cut it into quarters. When I told this to Noriko, she said “oh, you can cut it in a zigzag pattern so that it looks like a tulip.” Good grief! Now I’m supposed to be making decorative hors-d’oevres for my 8-year-old daughter’s lunch.

The lunch-box section in department stores is huge: besides the boxes, there are little bags to carry them in, chopstick sets, forks and spoons, and all kinds of cute little containers and dividers for putting cute little things into the boxes. Part of me feels woefully inadequate; but another part of me says, “Give me a break! Don’t they have anything better to do with their time?” There are even magazines devoted to creative bento box ideas.

For the record, tomorrow’s lunch is leftover gnocchi from tonight’s dinner, broccoli, mixed vegetables, and an orange (peeled and divided into sections). Okay, so I just put the vegetables into the box frozen and let them thaw in the refrigerator overnight. A lazy American has to take shortcuts somewhere.