Keep Your Bento Box Breakfast Fruit Fresh With One Foolproof Tip

If you're someone on the foodie side of social media, then you've probably seen Japanese bento boxes full of elaborate food designs. School children carry boxed lunches full of everything from teddy bear-shaped rice balls to squid-shaped sausages, while parents are packing the leftover scraps for breakfast. Whether you're creating a memorable masterpiece or putting cold noodles in your bento, there's one type of food that can go bad quickly and ruin all your meal-prep plans.

Keep your bento from spoiling by not cutting and packing fruit in advance. Some pre-packed fruit salads from the grocery store are full of sad, soggy melons and berries, developing mold after just a few days in the fridge — this rookie mistake makes fruit spoil faster. Fruit peels are there to protect the fruit. By removing them and cutting the insides into pieces, you're pushing the fruit's expiration date closer, exposing it to more bacteria. Different fruits also have different storage needs, so mixing the wrong pair together too soon can make both go to waste.

Only peel and slice fruit when you're ready to eat it, so either during breakfast or the night before. It sort of defeats the purpose of meal-prepping far in advance, but fresh fruit is a fickle thing by nature. There are other ways to meal-prep fruits and store them for maximum longevity in your breakfast bento.

Fresh fruit is always a treat, but some are a dish best served cold. The sweetest, crunchiest grapes are frozen. Sliced mangoes (peeled) and strawberries make for compact frozen chips with a lot of flavor, with a taste comparable to sorbet — plus there's no melting. Blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, cherries, or any other small, round fruits like these can go right into the freezer. All you have to do is grab a handful of whichever fruits you'd like for breakfast and pop them in the bento, where they're ready to eat as-is or thawed by lunchtime.

If your bento box is on the move for breakfast, keeping it cold can be difficult. Summers in Japan and the United States can get pretty hot, especially if you're commuting to work or school. Ice packs and insulation do a lot, but fruits exposed to warm air can brown nonetheless. For instance, apples and pears can brown within a few minutes of cutting. Citric acid is a common food preservative that comes from citrus, so a squeeze of lemon juice can brighten the chopped fruit's flavor and prevent it from browning on its bento journey.