Bento: Lunch as an art form

Kai Wilken needs an X-acto knife, a pair of scissors and a drinking straw to make his 5-year-old son lunch.

How else would he carve a realistic portrait of Mickey Mouse out of a slice of turkey?

Wilken makes lunch his artistic medium, creating sandwiches, salads and other dishes that look like superheroes and cartoon characters. Lunch meat is his canvas. His gallery, though, isn't exactly prestigious. His works of food art are on display for only a few minutes in a kindergarten lunchroom. Then, well, it's down the hatch.

But before we get too far into the elaborate lunches he makes his son, you need to know about these Tibetan monks Wilken saw about 15 years ago while attending the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Wearing saffron-colored robes, the monks created a mandala — a big, beautiful, colored sand painting. When they finished the painstaking artistic process, they destroyed it.

Like that, the difficult beauty was gone.

Now, Wilken isn't a Tibetan monk. He just subscribes to the monks' philosophy. Instead of sand, he uses melted cheese, cherry tomatoes and sandwich meat to craft colorful creations. And like the monks, he does it all knowing it will be destroyed — mauled in the mouth of his son, Laddie.

That doesn't quell Wilken's creativity one bit. He's made a sandwich scene of Batman, a pizza portrait of a jack-o'-lantern, a ready-to-eat Velveteen rabbit.

Wilken brings an over-the-top, Americanized mind-set to the classic idea of bento lunches — Japanese boxed lunches sometimes dolled up to look like animals or cartoon characters by loving moms. Wilken, though, is neither Japanese nor a mom. He is, in fact, a 35-year-old, quasi-stay-at-home dad who runs Zzzap! laser tag near 110th and Q Streets during the few non-parenting minutes in his day. In addition to Laddie, Wilken and his wife have a 2-year-old son.

Many mornings — or, more often, late nights — he toils for about an hour, cutting Curious George's face out of a piece of lunch meat, scoring cantaloupe to look like the superhero the Thing or finding Nemo in patterns of cheese. He gently places his creation in a container, hidden until his son opens it at lunch. Sometimes, the car ride has already destroyed it. Other times, Dad's food art is a bit too abstract for the boy. But many other times, Laddie likes it and — hopefully — understands just how much Dad loves him.

Then Laddie devours it.

So why spend so much time creating something that will be chewed, digested and — well, just why?

“Because I enjoy doing it,” Wilken wrote on his blog, where he chronicles his creations. “I enjoy the thought that he might enjoy it.”

Wilken may be an anomaly here in America, where a one-minute slap of peanut butter and jelly on bread is considered a justifiable lunch. But in Japan, that doesn't cut it, said Reiko Take Loukota, a Japanese immigrant who teaches her native language at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

In Japan, moms pride themselves on packing bento boxes with an array of colorful vegetables, meat and rice. The meals are well-rounded, healthy and visually pleasing. The extra effort is important to Loukota, who sends a bento lunch to school with her daughter every day. Her lunches aren't as creative as Wilken's, but they look and taste good enough.

“The time I spend on it is my love,” she said.

While it's not openly addressed, many moms and wives in Japan compete with each other to see whose son or husband has the most beautiful lunch, said Milton Yin, who serves bento lunches at his Omaha restaurant Hiro Sushi.

“There's a lot of, ‘My bento box looks better than yours,'” Yin said.

Most bento lunches in Japan, though, rely on the vegetables' natural beauty. It's only the kyaraben style that features food that looks like characters. That, of course, is where Wilken's interest is.

In the months before his oldest son went to kindergarten, Wilken began pondering what to do about lunch. Going to school would be a shock in many ways for Laddie, and Wilken hoped to make lunch a familiar, fun and grounding part of the day. He hoped to find a special lunchbox or gimmick to make Laddie feel more comfortable and to remind the boy he was loved. Wilken found some blogs about bento and quickly realized that's what he needed to do.

Of course, the practice is pretty fun for Dad, too. Wilken has a biology degree but has worked as a graphic artist. Making bento lunches feeds his creativity.

To create the roast beef and turkey Mickey Mouse sandwich, Wilken used a T-shirt featuring the character as a guide. He freehand snipped the outline of the mouse out of turkey using scissors. He sliced small pieces of seaweed with an X-acto knife and used them as details. He bored button holes with a drinking straw. He used all the tools to sculpt Mickey's pants out of a piece of apple.

In between cuts, Wilken placed the partially finished product in a plastic container to make sure the size was right. With a finished Mickey Mouse laying on a cutting board, Wilken slathered mayonnaise on a piece of bread that fit just inside the container. Then he pressed Mickey into place before garnishing his creation with bright orange carrots and deep green steamed broccoli. A few blackberries finished off the bento.

Wilken was moderately impressed with the finished product. It's not the best he's ever created. It's not the worst, either. Still, he knows kids and teachers will probably huddle around Laddie to see Dad's latest masterpiece.

But Wilken doesn't create it for them. This lunch is all about Laddie.

“It's a very personal experience for him,” Wilken said. “He uses all five senses. He can look at it, smell it, taste it, hear the carrots crack. Other people can see it, but he's the only one who can experience it like that. It's for him and no one else.”

In that regard, the experience is part of the art. But, yeah, it's a little painful for Wilken to know it's gone, devoured, so quickly. But then he remembers those monks. The memory of their creation gives him some clarity.

“If you're going to do your creating in sand, you can't get your saffron robes in a bunch when the tide comes in.”

Contact the writer:

444-1220, dane.stickney@owh.com