For quite some time now, I’ve been obsessed with this Web site called Bento Corner. A Japanese-American mom makes her two cute kids these intricate lunch boxes filled with tediously crafted flowers, animals and geometrical shapes out of typical Japanese lunch fare: seaweed, rice, sausage, egg, edamame, tofu, etc. She photographs them each day and puts them up on her site.

Bento is a way of getting Japanese kids to eat their lunch. It’s actually a pretty competitive thing; in the olden days, it was a symbol of how much your mother actually cared for you — the more intricate the bento, the more your mom loves you, I guess! Mothers would wake up as early as 5 A.M. and prepare bento, carefully choosing the color scheme, flavor palate and coordinating lunch box.

Not eating your bento meant that you disrespected your mom. And that would not be good, considering that she woke up three hours early to make a Sponge Bob-shaped egg and rice ball.

These bento pictured above are more for kids, but there are also bento boxes for adults, too. Japanese women make them for their husbands, and you can buy prepared bento boxes at restaurants as well.

If you want to try your hand at making bento, here’s a site with a few recipes and instructions. It has some really off-the-wall recipes, such as tea-marbled eggs, Indian-style chicken and Greek tamagoyaki.

And don’t forget to buy the bento box itself, which is just as much a part of the presentation as the food.