Thinking Outside of the Bag

This week I read a story in the Parade Magazine insert in our Sunday newspaper about three generations of a family who wrote notes on napkins in their loved ones’ sack lunches. I used to do that for my daughters. I am inspired to start doing it for my husband now that he is brown-bagging it every day.

The article got me thinking about all of the sack lunches I’ve made in my lifetime. From the time I was old enough to reach the kitchen counter my mother passed on the job of making lunches to me. First it was just my father’s lunch and mine, then my brother’s, a year later my sister’s was added, and finally, four years later, baby brother began school and his lunch box was lined up with the rest of ours. I seem to recall his was a metal Dukes of Hazard lunch pail. By this time, I’m sure I was too old for my Barbie-themed lunch container, handing it down to my little sister and opting for a brown paper sack with my name written on it with a black or red Bic Flair pen to distinguish it from my father’s lunch.

Lunches in those days consisted of a sandwich; cold cuts and American cheese, mustard on the meat side, Miracle Whip with the cheese. This was a rule no one in my family considered breaking until I grew up and discovered that mayonnaise was much tastier than Miracle Whip, but I still put the mayo on the cheese side. The lunch meat of choice at our house for years was a thin-sliced, packaged ham; a pressed meat sliced so thin you could actually, as my father would say, “read the newspaper through it.” He got more than one slice of ham, but we kids got only the one. In hindsight, I’m sure my frugal parents saw this ham as a budget-minded school lunch for four children. Mother did, however, always splurge on the best cheese – real American cheese, Kraft, none of that imitation processed American cheese food for her family. What is cheese food anyway?

Along with the sandwich we had a baggie of chips, not the small individual serving bags, but sandwich bags filled with chips from a family-sized bag of Ruffles or Fritos or Cheetos. I do recall a period of time when we always had a five-gallon can of Charles’ Chips brand potato chips. I’m not sure where they came from, but I’m almost thinking it was a bonus product one could have delivered to the front door with our gallon jugs of milk by the milkman.

A sweet treat rounded out our lunchtime fare. Typically cookies in another baggie; Oreos or gingersnaps or Fig Newtons or vanilla wafers. We knew we’d hit the big time when we graduated to Ding Dongs and Twinkies and garishly pink coconut studded Snowballs. I always nibbled around the edges of these desserts saving the bite with the white cream filling for last.

Every evening Daddy’s pocket change went into a plastic cup in the shape of an orange with “Smirnoff” molded onto the side, a promotional item pushing the consumption of screwdrivers. Every morning Mother gave us coins from this cup admonishing, “Don’t lose your milk money.” I never bought milk; I opted instead for a cup of crushed ice and grape “juice” from the fountain machine. I can still smell the artificial grape aroma wafting off of this pale purple excuse for juice. I’m sure it was nothing more than corn syrup and water dyed to look like Concord grapes.

By high school I was too cool to take my lunch, so I bought spaghetti or hamburgers or burritos in the lunch line at the school cafeteria and sat with my friends and flirted with boys. Then came the “open campus lunch,” probably the worst idea to hit school districts since New Math, where we got in cars and exceeded the speed limit to arrive en masse at fast food establishments where we wolfed down quarter pound hamburgers and over-salted French fries and washed it all down with large Dr. Peppers before speeding back to school in time to hear the lunch tardy bell ring as we pulled into the parking lot thanking our guardian angels that we weren’t all killed when we ran the last three red lights.

I hope school lunches have changed since my days of eating too much processed food from sacks, cafeterias, and fast-food restaurants. I hope what my sister tells me about the lunches her students bring to school is true. She reports that the pre-school aged children of today’s modern parents bring organic fruit and goat cheese and mineral water from France. I’ll keep that in mind as I pack my husband’s lunch and I’ll be sure to tuck a little love note in the bag as well. I hope he gets as much pleasure out of a random “I love you” in the middle of the day as I once did from the real American cheese my mother insisted on buying.