Instructions: Appetite-wise, my older daughter is a Californian and my younger one, mysteriously, has taste buds from the Midwest. Where one delights in vegetables, fruit and nouvelle cuisine, the other builds her food pyramid with meat, starch, sugar, oil and salt.

It is a struggle to pack two appealing and good-for-you lunches.

If only I had the dedication and ingenuity of mothers in Japan, where lunch-making is high art. Many a schoolchild eagerly anticipates unwrapping her bento-bako (lunch box) to see what tasty combination, artistically arranged, Okaasan (Mom) has packed that day.

At our house, tuna is a favorite, while peanut butter or turkey sandwiches work occasionally, but not for both kids. What happens when weve run through those options? Ive taken to packing rice, molded into balls or fancy shapes and sprinkled with a seaweed topping, along with sliced meat and vegetables on the side. Its my lazy approximation of a real Japanese box lunch.

In Japan, obento, boxed meals, have a long tradition. Usually, obento is rice, sometimes shaped into balls for easier handling, with any food that packs and keeps well.

Office workers, hikers, travelers and picnickers sometimes take elaborate meals, packed in separate or partitioned bento-bako made of plastic, wood or lacquer. Traditionally, the boxes were wrapped in a furoshiki, a large square cloth for carrying things. But today, schoolchildren wrap boxes in handkerchiefs or bandannas, and stuff them into book bags.

Bento-making is big business in Japan, where everything from fancy box lunches to simple seaweed-wrapped rice balls is available in markets and street stands.

In fact, one of the highlights of traveling in Japan is in sampling the food.

Each region features a local specialty, available even to harried railway travelers in box lunches sold on station platforms. You know where you are by the menu: If its unagi (eel), this must be Hamamatsu.

A typical obento meal includes meat or fish, with simmered vegetables and pickles. And, of course, rice. But theres a delightful variety, ranging from ham-and-cucumber sandwiches to pressed sushi.

In comparison, the United States offers a disappointingly narrow choice when it comes to fast and easy lunch-box food. Thats odd, considering our eclectic mix of people and the fact that so many of us grew up with comfort food that wasnt hamburgers, spaghetti or the ubiquitous chicken nuggets.

If American popular menus are ripe for diversification, one Fairfield company hopes to be on the cusp of change.

NRE World Bento is planning to sell Americans Japanese-style box lunches by October, said its president, Jeffrey Schnack. The firm is negotiating with colleges and catering companies.

The 3-year-old firm already knows something about being on the cutting edge.

In July, the company began selling meals in Japan, hurdling the steep import barriers that U.S. business executives have complained about for decades.

NRE World Bento is making 15,000 box lunches daily at its Solano County plant. Three varieties - salmon, beef sukiyaki and chicken-gobo (burdock root)

are frozen, then shipped to Japan, where theyre reheated in microwaves and sold at railway station kiosks.

The sale of foreign-made Japanese-style meals has created a stir in the press. The imported food challenges an unspoken but common belief: No one but Japanese can really make authentic Japanese food.

So how can an imported frozen meal compete with a domestic, fresh-made one?

First, these bento are inexpensive by local standards, at about $5, or slightly more than half that for a small size.

Second, the company is capitalizing on Japans intense interest in natural foods. NRE World Bento uses organic Akita Komachi rice, grown by Lundberg Family Farms in the Sacramento Valley. It is similar to high-quality Japanese-grown rice and has been certified as organic under Japans new agricultural standards law. That law was enacted in May to bring order to the chaos of growers and manufacturers claiming to sell organic and natural food.

Of course, it helps that the companys majority shareholder - Nippon Restaurant Enterprise Co. Ltd., which makes and sells obento and runs 300 restaurants, dining cars, station kiosks and hotel dining services - is nearly wholly owned by East Japan Railway Corp., a publicly traded, quasi-governmental

NRE World Bento officials spent the initial years courting Japans hidebound bureaucracy to win permission to import and sell California-made lunches.

To skirt astronomical tariffs imposed on foreign rice, NRE argued that at least 20 percent animal protein is mixed into their rice in the form of meat-based sauce. A technicality, yes. But NRE box lunches dont fall into the rice category, and slipped into the Japanese market.

As for the U.S. market, Schnack believes Americans are ready for Japanese-style obento. Imagine: for travelers, for soccer moms, for weary lunch-packers, an alternative to double cheeseburgers, personal pepperoni pizzas and burritos. I cant wait.

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