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When Julie Ellis was in school, she didn't spend her allowance on movies or concert tickets – but on lunch. She couldn't bring herself to eat the bland sandwiches her parents packed for her, so she'd discreetly drop her brown bag in the trash and head to the cafeteria.

Now with three children of her own, the Burlington, Ont., mother has found a way to make sure her kids actually eat the lunches she packs for them: She's bowed to the ways of the Japanese and become a bento mom.

Two years ago, Ellis purchased a set of bento boxes – food containers that open up to house several smaller containers – for each of her kids. In these Japanese-style lunch boxes she now packs creative, nutritious and environmentally-friendly meals every morning. Some days it's a veggie and meat wrap, applesauce, carrot sticks and cookies; other mornings it's a sandwich, yogurt, strawberries and mini-muffins.

Apart from winning over her kids, bento boxes have other benefits, too. “My impetus was to give my kids less packaged food. I wanted to create litter-less lunches,” she said.

Allergies, environmental pressures and picky eaters have made the once-straightforward task of packing lunch a morning stumbling block for many parents.

But well-balanced meals packed in colourful bento boxes have infiltrated lunch rooms as a healthy alternative to peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and boxes of fruit punch. Online, food blogs and Flickr photo pools devoted to bento lunches now showcase the talents of mothers who unleash their inner Da Vinci on the carrots and eggs in their kids' lunch boxes.

It took months for Kia Park to figure out why her kids would come home from school every day completely drained of energy. It turned out they were skipping lunch. They weren't interested in the corn dogs, pizza and chicken nuggets served at their cafeteria. At the sacrifice of between 15 and 45 minutes each morning before she goes to work, the Temecula, Calif., mom now sends her son and daughter to school with meals she knows they'll eat.

For her, bentos are an opportunity to create culinary art. On seven-year-old Bryce and nine-year-old Devin's first day of school last week, they were treated to hard-boiled quail eggs dyed and decorated to look like chicks and rice balls formed and garnished to look like smiling cows on a bed of veggies and salmon – all packed neatly in their boxes.

“I thought they'd get teased, but my daughter feels like it makes her the cool kid at school,” said Ms. Park. In fact, she had to endure Devin's wrath after she shared some bento secrets with inquisitive mothers on the playground last year.

“She'd get so mad if I'd give out information. She'd be like, ‘I won't feel special any more,'” said Ms. Park.

Dieticians are also encouraging parents to pack their kids these types of lunches rather than giving in to the temptation of packaged foods.

“A child gets used to eating healthy when they're young – you're already developing those good habits,” said Susin Cadman, a registered dietician in Brandon, Man.

While packing sodium-rich deli meats such as bologna or salami helps kids develop a taste for salty foods, introducing them to healthier cuisine at a young age makes them more open to eating those foods in adulthood, she said.

When Aster Setiadi's six-year-old son Timothy hovers in the kitchen of their Berwick, Pa., home while his mother packs his lunch, it's not pizza he begs for, but broccoli with cheese and brown rice. Ms. Setiadi has conditioned him to be an unusually healthy eater by disguising healthy food as art. She constructs flower petals from whole-wheat bread and grinning lion faces from imaginatively-arranged rice, fried egg and seaweed.

Her philosophy echoes that of many bento moms: “Give them a presentation that's fun, then later you can explain that it's healthy,” she said.

Knowing her son wolfs down his lunch every day makes the 20 minutes of prep time worth it, she said.

But making a bento lunch can take even less time than that, insists Deborah Hamilton, the blogger who has been dubbed “the Rachael Ray of bento.” Her Lunch in a Box blog features pictures and descriptions of the “speed bentos” she makes for her four-year-old son in mere minutes.

“You could start from scratch and try to create amazing food art,” she says. “But honestly, it's not going to happen for me and not going to happen for most moms.”

She limits herself to preparing only one part of his meal from scratch in the morning, the rest is made up of leftovers from the fridge or freezer and her stockpile of bento-friendly goodies, such as Babybel cheese.

“It's easy to be intimidated when you think about bento-style lunch, like, ‘These are people who have so much time to spend on it.'” she says. “It can fit into your regular lifestyle.”

Bento basics

The top three foods registered dietitian Susin Cadman says you should avoid packing in your kid's lunch:

Kool-Aid Jammers
Why: Too many artificial colours and sweeteners
Alternative: Real fruit juice, milk or water in a reusable container

Oscar Mayer Lunchables
Why: Little nutritional value; highly processed
Alternative: Skip the meat and make your own with cheese and whole-grain crackers

Deli meat
Why: High in saturated fats, sodium and nitrates (a carcinogen)
Alternative: Sandwich with leftover roast beef or chicken

Bento mom Deborah Hamilton's rules for a balanced lunch:

The proportions rule
Divide bento box into six parts.
Fill three with carbs such as bread or pasta, two with fruits and veggies such as apple slices or cucumbers, and one with protein such as a chicken drumstick.

The colours rule
Try to pack as many different colours as you can to cover different food groups and make the meal visually appealing.
Example: a cherry tomato, orange slices, beef strips, white rice, lettuce