"bears" news and stories

For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.

Today's bento makes the most of food coloring, with yellow, blue, pink and purple letter mini-onigiri stuffed with tuna and shaped like letter blocks. Letter details are cheese. The teddy is stuffed with tuna, wasabi and mayo, with nori and cheese details. The box is filled out with broccoli and shumai dumplings.

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There are some places where you can get bacon ice cream already, but how would you feel about ice cream made of frozen berries, meat and bones? Don't worry - this isn't a new flavor from Haagen Dazs or anything like that. This is a concoction being fed to some of the animals at the Zurich Zoo in Switzerland. Temperatures have been at record highs there this summer, and the zookeepers say that the "alternative ice cream" helps keep the animals comfortable and cool, not to mention that they seem to quite like the taste. The mix is being given to the big cats, apes and wolves. Hopefully they have something equally tasty (relatively speaking) for the zoo's other residents.

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While I still believe that the 13-pound gummy bear is the true definition of gluttony, Flickr user Wiedmaier has depicted all seven deadly sins in that most noble medium of gummy. Titled "The Seven Gummie Sins," the series features seven photos of bears acting out, well, you get the idea. As you might have guessed, the one pictured here is envy. Who knew those little bears could be so emotive? If you get a chance, check out the rest of Wiedmaier's library, as there's some great food photography as well.

[Via Elliot Back]

In the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Goldilocks broke into the bears' house and at their porridge. In West Vancouver, one of the bears decided to turn the tables on the tale by breaking into a kitchen and settling in for a lovely bowl of oatmeal. The 2-year old bear - Baby Bear, perhaps - entered a home through a partially open sliding glass door, opened the pantry and started to eat from a ceramic container of oats, where he was discovered by the owner of the house.

The woman called the police, who decided that because the bear was neither aggressive towards humans nor was he doing anything besides eating the oatmeal, they would simply wait for him to leave. And when he felt 'just right,' he ambled out the door and back into the forest.

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