A few weeks back I decided I’d had enough of overpriced delivery food for lunch. There are great restaurants near my office, but I don’t want to spend the time or money it takes to visit one every day and the takeout is often abysmal - it costs just as much but shows up late, cold and frequently wrong (like the time I ordered a chorizo omelette and got a pork sandwich). So I started packing my lunch, just tossing sandwiches and other stuff in miscellaneous shopping bags lying around the house.

But I don’t want to become a Victoria’s Secret bag person any more than I want to keep eating takeout. While it’s true that I have yet to stoop quite that low, I can’t really argue that there’s a significant difference between carrying my lunch in a bag that recently held fantastical things from Kid Robot and one that recently held overpriced panties. So I went in search of a proper lunchbox, and settled on the one sold by Obentec. Yes, their site is very goofy in a late-nineties sort of way, and yes their friendly laptop character makes me cringe, but the lunchbox? It is perfect.

I’ve used it pretty much every day for the past three weeks or so, and I like it more every day. I had some trouble at first getting normal-sized bread to fit in one of the larger containers until I realized I could just buy mini-pitas and mini-bagels at Trader Joe’s and sidestep the issue entirely. My lunches now are cheaper and infinitely more awesome than my previous sandwich-and-soda standby, and I can just toss the whole thing in the dishwasher when I don’t feel like dealing with it by hand. I couldn’t be happier, and apparently neither could the folks in this Flickr pool, who all have the same lunchbox I do. (I have not yet started photographing my lunches, however.)