It’s back to school time! Actually, school has been underway for a few weeks and I wonder how everyone’s enthusiasm for making lunches is holding up. Back in the day, when I was a wee one, I walked home for lunch most days, except when it was rainy and cold, or if it snowed. I would have some delightful warm lunches of a little round frozen pizza blackened nicely on the edges, or a melty grilled cheese sandwich and a hot mug of Campbell’s tomato soup. If I was really lucky there might be left over spaghetti, warmed up in the battered aluminum saucepan that also cooked my brother’s obnoxious Wheatena on cold winter mornings.
This being the dark ages we did not have a cafeteria at our elementary school, we had a lunch room. And for a few years when the school was over-crowded, we gathered in the gym, sitting at the lunch tables that had been moved out of the former lunchroom, which was now pressed into service as another fifth grade classroom. (And when I was in fifth grade the room had that funny underlying stale food smell with an underlying whiff of vomit…) Everyone brought their lunches from home. I brought mine in brown paper bags, while some of the kids, who brought their lunch every day, had very enviable showcase-y lunch boxes. It took me a while to puzzle out the Beatles lunch box that tall snotty Heidi toted about. I didn’t know who the Beatles were. We were a Walt Disney show family, never watched Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights, and totally missed the Fab Four phenom grip the nation. I was found culturally wanting…
On the days that I ate at school I would have humble little deviled ham sandwiches, with lashing of Hellmann’s mayonnaise on neatly cut slices of Pepperidge Farm white bread. My mother would wrap the sandwich in a sheet of waxed paper – pre-Baggies days these were! Sometimes it would be peanut butter or crunchy peanut butter (hold the jelly, please!). Other times it was white American cheese from Benny’s butcher shop. Always on white bread. Rye bread was exotic stuff. (I never had a bagel until I was visiting my brother in college in Ohio when I was a junior in high school!) Sometimes there would be a waxed paper bag of potato chips, and always an impossible-to-peel orange. We could buy milk in little red and white cartons at school, for the princely sum of 4¢ a day. Invariably, it was warm.
In junior high there was no home-for-lunch option available to us. This school had a real cafeteria, with cafeteria ladies and hot lunches. I only bought lunch on Fridays, when I could have pizza. One year I sat with Sheila every day. That was the year that she carried a bologna-and-catsup sandwich every day, for 180 days. No fooling. She was single-minded about her lunch. And she is fit and trim today, and eats fruits and vegetables. She survived junior high school.
My children were on the cusp of so many movements. I never gave them white bread until they went to preschool, and they were shocked to discover that there was something super delicious for sandwiches that I had been denying them for almost four years! Then they learned to read. And it was the end of the line for substituting spinach for iceberg lettuce in their tacos. I really don’t like the drastic deception some food writers employ for getting kids to eat certain foods. I don’t condone the deceit. (Although I did grind up carrots and put them in meatballs, even though my children gobbled up carrots any way.) Carrots were perfect in Baggies for school lunches in their Hello Kitty and Thomas-the-Tank-Engine lunch boxes. https://www.thedailymeal.com/12-ways-sneak-vegetables-kids-favorite-lunchbox-recipes-slideshow
Sheila’s karma rubbed off on the Tall One for a while, except that he liked yellow mustard on his almost-daily bologna sandwiches instead of catsup. And on Fridays they would both buy pizza in the cafeteria, never mind that on Friday nights we ritually baked our own crispy pizzas, in white clouds of flour and drifts of cornmeal. There is nothing nicer for a Monday lunch than a slice of left-over, home-baked pizza. With some nice cold 2% milk. And since they are both away at college now, eating their own bagels, there is more left-over pizza for us. All’s well that ends well.
Here are some other lunch box ideas: https://www.thedailymeal.com/mac-n-cheese-lunch-box-muffins
And at Food52, the ever-clever Amanda has some really fab lunch ideas. I don’t think she will be sneaking spinach into the tacos, though. https://www.food52.com/blog/4436_the_return_of_amandas_kids_lunch
“ ‘We could take our lunch,’ said Katherine.‘What kind of sandwiches?’ said Mark.
‘Jam,’ said Martha thoughtfully, ‘and peanut-butter-and-banana, and cream-cheese-and-honey, and date-and-nut, and prune-and marshmallow…’”
-Edward Eager, Magic by the Lake
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