Design of Lunchbox

I thought their preferred mode of transporting lunches was in small ornate cardboard boxes.

Firat step...decide on your critera... style, economy, practicality etc. Materials are virtually unlimited... polythene, polypropylene..but they don't look too good...

ABS plenty of colours,good finish, cheap, fairly robust.

Polycarbonate..very tough..

Hand laquered papier maché takes years of skill but would be superb!

Wood... card...alluminium...

Pasta (silly)

Del

You could make it similar to a fishing tackle box with fold out trays and make the whole thing microwavable. (no metal)

Only problem, you don't want your food to end up tasting like the lunchbox, so some kind of interior coating/liner that is designed for food preparation (i.e. not plastic)

Japanese traditionally eat their lunches from heavily lacquered pinewood boxes called bento. To appeal to schoolkids, use popular anime or manga characters like Doraemon or Pikachu. To appeal to teenagers, use J-idols. Get permission if you decide to do this.

use popular anime or manga characters .

Please please please please please....be original

That does answer the question about why Japanese students require a specially-designed lunchbox.

Cornish tin miners used to lunch upon diced meat-and-vegetables. It was inconvenient to have these loose in any form of lunch box down a tin mine, with all the dirt and dust, so the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_pasty was invented as a means of containing them. Originally, the pastry part of the meal was thrown away to appease the spirits that were supposed to bedevil those that worked underground, becoming, in effect, a disposable lunchbox. A miner could thus eat the whole of the intended meal without contaminating it with the dirt found on the hands.

The true Cornish pasty is supposed to have a partition inside it, separating the savoury filling compartment from the sweet filling compartment, the 'afters'. According to http://www.jethro.co.uk/, the true Cornish pasty has to have one end dipped in jam before it is cooked, so that the eater can tell upon inspection of the unbroken pasty that the sweet filling is at the other end.