This is a guest post by niceties of Main-Main Masak-Masak, where she blogs about how she deals with her food intolerences and dietary preferences. I've been an admirer of her calm, elegant and very informative essays for quite a long time, so I'm really happy to have her on board as a guest blogger!

It was because of increasingly complex food sensitivities that I was motivated to learn more about cooking and bento culture, so as to be able to adapt recipes and to make my packed meals from home more appetising. The principles of bento culture go a long way in making our food-intolerance-friendly lunchboxes more tasty and attractive. Learning to be creative in those two areas is particularly important when one is faced with the limitations of food restrictions. Here is a quick guide to my approach to bento for special diets, summarising the key ideas I've mentioned across many different postings on my blog.

A light stuffed fish cake recipe that's really good in bentos.

A guest post by Fossettes of Bentolunchbox, one of the most popular French bento blogs!

This is a guest post by Iliana (aka Mosaica), who blogs about her daily life at The Daily Mosaica.

In life I often find myself embracing contradictions, and with regard to planning and preparing bento lunches, it appears that I am, at least, consistent. At times I am purely focused on taking a given recipe, often a Japanese recipe, and rendering it as authentically as possible given the constraints of my semi-rural existence in Vermont, a small state in the northeast of the US.  For instance the bento from last week where I made inarizushi -- this meal nourished me on a number of levels: it was completely delicious,  it tied into a fascinating bit of cultural history, and it expanded my culinary repertoire. While I do miss the days when I was more of a globe-trotter, I've come to really appreciate how traveling via recipes from far, far away can give real pleasure --to my nose and eyes and tastebuds, as well as to my intellectual bits.

On the other hand, I'm also a bit of a fiesty girl, and I like to kick up my heels, as it were, in the kitchen, and for me this manifests itself as a willingness to play with food, to be led by my nose, or intuition, or a gut feeling that mixing this with that might just be yummy. That's what this post is about: Taking ingredients which are traditional in Japanese cuisine and dressing them up in flavors from around the globe: Tibet, Denmark, Africa, India, and beyond. In addition, if you start from a perspective of your own preferred ratio of carb to protein to veggies and fruit, I encourage you to include entirely new ingredients to add fresh flavor and interest to your bento meal. During the five weeks of the Bento Challenge, I was inspired to see how many of us were using foods and flavors from our own backyards to create delicious new twists on the bento theme.

This is a guest post by Tracy, aka Crazed Veggie, who blogs about bentos, amigurumi and personal rants and raves at CrazedVeggie.com. She's lost 50 pounds (22.7 kg) so far since June of last year, and uses bentos as part of her successful weight loss program!

The story goes a little something like this. I've been overweight all my life. Struggling with the weight had been an everyday thing and I've never known anything different. Two years ago I decided to become vegetarian. I did this due to ethical reasons (I just couldn't go on knowing that an animal had to die for me to shove food in my mouth!). Once I became dedicated and seen how easy it was for me to make such a massive change in my food habits, I decided that I was going to watch everything that I ate and not destroy my body any longer. I joined a calorie counting website and went on a mission to lose weight. That was June of 2008, and so far I've lost 50 pounds!

I began incorporating bento box making into my weight loss program in January. As soon as I began researching the history behind them and the many websites and blogs dedicated to them, I knew this was something that I just had to be a part of.

This is a guest post by Diana, who blogs about her healthy eating ideas at Soap and Chocolate.

Not everyone eats breakfast as well as lunch at the office, but for those of us who begin work at 9am after a whirlwhind of exercise, showering and primping, it's convenient to be able to pack a bento-style breakfast the night before in order to cut down on the morning rush time. We all want to preserve those precious minutes of sleep before the alarm goes off!
 
One of my favorite homemade to-go breakfasts is an omelette sandwich and fruit. This can be done with a myriad of mix-ins and spreads, but for the purposes of this post, I've gone with a Mexican theme, just to step out of the bento box a bit.