Japanese Obento: The Link between Food and Society

I found it extremely intriguing the attention focused by the Japanese on their obento, especially compared to the carelessness of American lunches. Lunchables offer no symbolic love or support. The whole Japanese culture seems to be fixated completely on productivity, and since lunch is the only break the children receive from incessent learning, it is the only time a mother can express her love. It is also noticeably different in France, where children are allowed to go home for lunch. I think that food truly highlights the foundations of our societies: what children eat for lunch reveals a certain truth about the nature of the entire society.

So for making my obento in class, I decided to go with the cute animal dominant present in Asian culture and make a bear out of the rice triangle. I tried to contrast the colors as much as I could, throwing flavor contrast to the winds. It is hard to see, but the seaweed wrap under the yellow and pink contains egg and Japanese vegetables. Other than the high salt content, I designed the obento to be an overall healthy meal with all the major food groups represented.

My obento including pickled plums, seaweed, rice, fish, cucumber, egg,

Japanese vegetables, squash, green beans, and salmon

Andrea Arai, our guest speaker and expert on obento, noted that the economy of Japan had a huge effect on the modern obento. During the boom of the 1980s, the obento was more important than ever because the Japanese believed that if you followed traditions, a happy future lay ahead. I couldn’t help but compare this to the economic boom in the United States in the 1950s. In Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, she notes that the typical 1950-era American family ate a meat-and-potatoes meal almost every night cooked by a mother that was expected to stay at home a provide for the family. It is a reasonable assumption to suggest that Japanese food will soon go the way of American food: much less strictly structured and much less traditional. Already, Japanese wives have begun to leave the house and take jobs, leaving the obento in an unsure position in Japanese society. But I thoroughly enjoyed the art of designing my food’s appearance for the first time, something largely absent in American cuisine, even if the taste wasn’t the best.