Something strange happened today, and it seemed noteworthy so I relate it here. I have begun bringing my lunch to work (save money, eat better, blah bitty blah blah) and my vessel of choice is Mr. Bento.
Mr. Bento is a tremendous modern (and Japanese!) replacement for the lunchbox: a bullet shaped container with four sub-containers that holds ample food and keeps them hot or cold depending on your needs. The problem with Mr. Bento is that there are four (and only four) containers within the outer container. It’s not really a problem, because it forces me to think about what I take to lunch and I try and match my dietary needs to these containers: fruits, vegetables, proteins and carbs in some variation. The questions is what happens to the excess (and for me the excess is the cheese to go with the crackers or the dressing to go with the salad)? Add them before the day begins and something is inedible and soggy when meal time rolls around. Dedicate salad dressing to one of the vessels and (gasp), I get deprived of food.
This is a plight that I have battled for some time. I even toyed with buying the massive (3500 count) of condiment cups sold at Costco to hold those miniscule repositories for, well, ‘damp stuff’ that I don’t want intermingling with my ‘dry stuff’. While this is a problem that I felt was unique to me in reality it is not. Mr. Bento is a commercial product that is sold by Amazon and other major retailers. Other people surely have this problem, but it’s not like I can go t a Mr. Bento support group and since they are a Japanese company, the web-based forums (if they exist) are not likely to be much help. This is truly a niche-community based issue. Although, it’s not likely that there are specific online communities dedicated to practical solutions to Mr. Bento shortcomings, so how to solve this problem?
In actuality, the solution came to me. And, it came to me in a community that I never would have expected. Today, in discussing Mr. Bento with my co-workers (it is quite the conversation piece), a co-worker pointed out to me that there was a “Mr. Bento Porn” group on Flickr. The group consists of decidedly G-Rated pictures of meals that people have packed into their Mr. Bento. The meals are impressively gourmet and packed with absolute precision – all 5,000+ of them. Among these 5,000 are more than a dozen solutions to my problem of separating wet from dry, from the aforementioned condiment cups to custom hello kitty containers. Problem solved.
It seems that every time I get comfortable with the resources the online world has to offer, something new springs up, some new way of looking at things, some new way of crowd-sourcing solutions. In this instance, the photo contributors had no idea that they would solve my problem. Hell, they weren’t even trying to solve a problem. They were just contributing information (in this instance a proud display of their perfectly packed lunch) and it helps someone in need (so to speak). And to think, 15 years ago, I would have had an owner’s manual (in Japanese) and a phone number (in Japan) to help me. AH, the magic of the interwebs, delicious, delicious interwebs.
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