Punitha Kumar speaks to Samantha Lee, the Malaysian mum who makes works of art out of the food she creates for her family.

Samantha Lee is a stay-at-home mum with two daughters. But this mother has over 700,000 followers on Instagram. The followers keep increasing as we speak due to her pictures of food. This is no regular picture of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a ‘Valencia’ filter imposed on it. Rather, it is Lady Gaga made out of fried egg, cheese, nori sheets and white rice with a side of beans and roasted tomatoes.

“When I started a family, I learned about cooking and eating healthy.

“From that, I wanted to encourage my daughters to eat healthy and independently so I started making food art,” she said stating that her food art began in December 2008 when her eldest daughter, then two years old, ate very slowly during mealtimes.

However, with the food art, Samantha said both her daughters were now adventurous with the food they ate, always ready to try new cuisines and food experiences.

“They also love to contribute ideas to my food art pieces and try to help me out in the kitchen – this makes for great family bonding time!”

She said: “Truthfully, I didn’t know if making fun meals would work for my kids. It certainly did after a few attempts, and it motivates me to do more.

These days, I have my kids to pick out the ingredients and help prepare the meal. Not only will this stimulate their creativity, they’ll be proud to bring something to the table and discuss ingredients being used in the creations during meal times.”

Samantha executes her creations with fresh ingredients and said she always tries to stay away from processed food and adds that she sketches her food prior to creating it, to avoid food wastage.

It’s not tiresome to create fun meals. Most of my creations are super easy to make. I shape the food while cooking so it gets done at the same time. It takes about the same amount of time to cook an ordinary meal.

Samantha added that she regularly conducts workshops in Malaysia for parents who are interested to create similar food art for their children.

Samantha, who has no professional culinary training, said these are meals created with ingredients and tools such as scissors and toothpicks, which are available in every home.

She also said that there is a growing number of parents who are willing to try different methods in ensuring their children eat healthy and this is one such way which parents can partake by transforming and executing food art using local ingredients.

Samantha is not the only mother who prefers to transform a plate of pasta into Brave’s Princess Merrida. In Japan, character-based bento lunchboxes known as ‘kyaraben’ have been around since 2007.

It all began when one mother decided to create a kyaraben and send her child to school with the lunchbox. The rest, as we say, is history. These days, there are competitions held within schools and kindergartens in Japan for creative lunchbox meals.

However, there is of course a drawback to this and several educational institutions have strict regulations that children are only allowed to bring regular lunchboxes to school as this would avoid any potential bullying or extra requirements from parents who do not have the time or resources to create kyarabens for their children.

But, if you think you’re up for a challenge and would like dabble in some food art, follow Samantha on Instagram or visit her Facebook page which contains videos on how to re-create some of her food art dishes. Nevertheless, instead of staring into your plain and dull lunchbox, you could just follow her and drool over the images of her food.