Playing With Your Food: Bento Boxes Get a Make Over

Bento boxes have a standard topography to place your gyoza, salad, noodles and array of sushi. Or so the Western world thought; enter Christopher D. Saylers’ new book Face Food Recipes, a book filled with characters you can re-create with your food. Providing pencil drawings to show the required ingredients and instructions on how to position them to make edible designs ranging from Manga favorites to Cinderella to Pikachu, all with the wave of a seaweed sheet and squeeze of a mushroom. This practical guide is a how-to follow up from his 2008 book Face Food: The Visual Creativity of Japanese Bento Boxes which shared the history of charaben or kyaraben, the culinary art form by Japanese women who design works of art in their children’s food as a way to draw attention to their lunch boxes. Brown paper bag lunches have some re-inventing to do.

[Via Wired.com]