Superhero Lunches Rule the Cafeteria Table

Kai Wilken is a dad like many of us. When he sends his son to school, Kai packs a lunch with thoughtful care. Unlike mortal dads, however, he creates works of pure lunch genius: bento box-style sandwiches that resemble superhero or other cartoon characters. (Bonus awesome: He runs a laser tag place!)

He spends an hour or more each day designing something that will be devoured in just a few minutes:

Wilken makes lunch his artistic medium, creating sandwiches, salads and other dishes that look like superheroes and cartoon characters. Lunch meat is his canvas. His gallery, though, isn't exactly prestigious. His works of food art are on display for only a few minutes in a kindergarten lunchroom. Then, well, it's down the hatch.

But before we get too far into the elaborate lunches he makes his son, you need to know about these Tibetan monks Wilken saw about 15 years ago while attending the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Wearing saffron-colored robes, the monks created a mandala — a big, beautiful, colored sand painting. When they finished the painstaking artistic process, they destroyed it.

Like that, the difficult beauty was gone.

Now, Wilken isn't a Tibetan monk. He just subscribes to the monks' philosophy. Instead of sand, he uses melted cheese, cherry tomatoes and sandwich meat to craft colorful creations. And like the monks, he does it all knowing it will be destroyed — mauled in the mouth of his son, Laddie.

ABC/Yahoo has a (non-embeddable) video of Wilken making a superhero lunch, and Wilken's blog explains how he turns, say, a bit of peeled apple into Mickey Mouse's pants.

And I thought I was doing well to slip the occasional cookie in with the fruit, yogurt, and sandwich!