These Creative Bento Box Lunches Will Make Your Kid the Envy of the Cafeteria

Any kid would flip for this peanut-butter "bulldozer" and star-shaped kiwi and cucumber slices. It'll be so hard to make them follow the "don't play with your food" rule.

Writer Jenny Mollen offers a constant barrage of bento-box inspiration through her Instagram, @dictatorlunches. This one turns rice and salmon into a couple of inviting characters!

Mini cookie cutters turn plain ol' sandwiches into little bunnies — this lunch was served up right before Easter break, but you can find a cookie cutter for evergreen favorite shapes like dinosaurs or letters and numbers.

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If you don't think it'll work to cut up a whole sandwich into a cute shape, you can always try cutting out one element — say, just the cheese — and layering it on top.

What about breakfast for lunch? One of those little compartments is surely big enough to hold some mini-pancakes. (The creator here says the mini syrup bottle came from a Hello Fresh delivery — she keeps refilling it.)

These smiling pandas were made out of rice with furikaki — a dry rice seasoning topper — on top. If you can't find it at your local store, you can get furikaki on Amazon.

A regular salami-sandwich can do the trick, but the food looks so much more inviting when it is broken down into little mini-bites.

Not only is the sandiwch owl (and her owlets) a little work of art, we're incredibly impressed by the checkerboard pattern carved into the apple peel.

Hack: if you want to sub-divide the bento box compartments into even smaller segments, cupcake liners can also double as food separators.

The banana dolphin with the grape "ball" in its mouth — genius! (The panda is a crêpe, and the butterflies are made out of watermelon.)

Another item kids can't resist? A series of "roll-ups," or a wrap cut down into more manageable circles. Kids get less frustrated than when they try to eat a whole wrap (and it inevitably falls apart).

You can explain to kids beforehand that getting enough vitamins is one thing that gives superheroes their strength (kind of like Popeye with his spinach).

This cheese-sandwich duck is swimming on a "pond" of blue pasta, which the creator made herself using blue food coloring and dry pasta.

The unicorn/mermaid food fad is still going strong, as this rainbow-themed lunch can attest. The unicorn cutout in the Babybel cheese gives it the perfect finishing touch.

Who says leftovers are just for the adults? This mom slipped in a portion of farfalle with peas and homemade meatballs into her kids' lunchbox, with clementine slices for dessert.

Of course, the perfect food to pair with the green-fried-rice Ninja Turtle is a homemade mini pizza! If Michelangelo'll eat his veggies, so will your kids.

With lunches this pretty, yes, they'll even eat salad! And, if you have multiple kids, you can whip up one big bowl of salad and divide it into their different lunches, cutting down on some of the work for you.

The OmieBox has one vaccuum-sealed compartment that keeps food hot — even black bean soup, like in this lunch here — while the rest of it stays room-temperature. (Or, if you prefer, you can use the sealed compartment to keep refrigerated food, like dips, cold.)

It's amazing how much fun a couple of candy eyeballs can inject into a healthy lunch. This mom also made single-serve pizzas with some leftover naan bread.

This bento box takes the old put-a-message-in-the-lunch trick to the next level! (And the rest of the lunch is out-of-this-world, too!)