Lest anyone get the wrong idea...

I do food art to entertain myself. When I take a picture and put it up there on flickr, it's "hey, look at this silly thing I made out of food." That's it. I'm not trying to persuade anyone that what I've made is scrumptious, or precisely balanced nutritionally, or that it's what they should be feeding their kids. It's just a picture made out of food. I do my own thing, I make pictures out of food, that's where it begins and that's where it ends.

Now, there does exist a (large) bento community with whom I'm more-or-less loosely affiliated, in that a lot of my stuff shows up in bento boxes...I make oekakiben (picture bento). I'm not a mainstream bento-maker, though. If you're looking for nutritious ideas for an adorable lunch to send off with your preschooler, there are lots and lots of people who will have great information for you. You can browse flickr and see all kinds of appetizing combinations and great ideas for bento lunches. Do what you like. Bento is what you make it.

I eat what I make because I don't waste food. Blue rice, for all the reaction it seems to inspire in people, tastes like regular rice. It's just blue. It's tinted with natural food coloring, it's not harmful, it's just blue. The same goes for applesauce tinted blue and anything else I might have gone nuts and tinted blue at some point. Some people are fascinated with blue food. Some people find it repulsive. If you don't like it, you don't have to make it or eat it.

It's your choice. Everything is your choice...what ingredients to use, what recipes to make, what the nutritional balance should be, whether or not your rice is an orthodox color. You choose whether your sandwich looks like Hello Kitty or a monster or a good old no-frills sandwich.

Besides the me-vs-most-bento-makers comparison being a total apples-and-oranges thing, what's wrong with a little adventure? In my flickr profile (where I try to catch people on their way to announce to me what they think of blue rice), I mentioned chef Cat Cora and how fun her innovations can be. Cotton candy on soup gave her audience pause, but they swirled it in and found it delicious. This stuff can work.

Have you ever flipped through a magazine and seen one of those beef council ads, with the landscapes made of beef? There's brown sugar sand and sour cream snowcaps. Would you eat beef with brown sugar and sour cream? Probably not, but hey, it's a cool picture made of food. If it gives you a "hey, what if I..." moment, so much the better. And that's really all I'm doing.

Hope that helps clarify some things.

Couple bits of news...

Number one, 501 Bento Box Lunches is just now coming out in the states. (If you have it pre-ordered under "500 Bento Box Lunches", don't sweat it...it's the same book. They just gave you a bonus.) It's a collaborative effort and showcases a lot of talented people. The photos are beautiful and...perhaps on purpose...the paperback is just about the same size as the squarish one-tier boxes, which I found cute.

I saw some complaints on various reviews about lack of recipes and such, and I know that I did submit recipes, so they must have had to edit a lot for space. I'll go ahead and re-post some of those recipes here as soon as I get them tracked down again, so that they'll be available to the curious. Sorry about that...the editors make all the final decisions with that stuff.

Also, I have a gallery show coming up next month. I'm still not clear on exactly how long it will be...I think I have the gallery for a month, but the opening is on July 17th in the Art Space in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Still got to nail a lot of those details down. Because I obviously can't leave a bunch of bento boxes out in a gallery for a month, there will only be "fresh examples" on opening night...the rest will be assorted photos that might be familiar from those who know my stuff on flickr. I'd like to do some new ones too....we'll see how that goes. I had no idea that prepping for a gallery show was so much work.

As far as I know, I still have some stuff up in the hallway of Giacomo's, too.

Thanks :)

Korero's 501 Bentos Site