I thought packing lunches for school and work went out of vogue a long time ago. Come to think of it, the term “went out of vogue” has probably gone out of vogue.
For younger folks, that refers to something that was popular or a big craze or custom at one time that has sort of faded away.
Everybody took lunches to school when I was growing up, and my dad and all the other men who worked at the paper mill carried food to work in brown paper bags.
Those sack lunches were not always for lunch. Mill people worked shifts from 7 a.m. until 3 p.m., 3 to 11 or the shift they called “graveyard” from 11 at night to 7 in the morning. So the bags of food from home were consumed at various hours.
I thought about all this when I read in a national publication that taking lunch to work has become “chic.” Then it came to mind again when I had to fix the first school lunch I’ve made in years. It was for our granddaughter Allie, a second-grader.
Allie left her lunchbox in my car after school one day, and I decided it would be easier for me to make Allie’s lunch and drop it off to her at school than to get the lunchbox back to her mother.
There are some days when Allie likes the menu at the school lunchroom and others when she carries her lunch. The day she left her lunchbox, she wanted to take her own food.
When I started making her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Regina said she had other preferences for lunch like those pre-packed “snackable” things with salami, beef jerky, sunflower seeds, melba toast and other stuff.
Sometimes, she takes a so-called protein pack with rolled-up slices of ham, turkey and cheese. We didn’t have any of those fancy products, but there was some deli ham and cheese in the fridge.
I packed her a plain ham and cheese sandwich, an apple, cookies and one of the Mounds candy bars we both like. I stopped by the store on the way to school to get her some chips.
We had some Fritos, but Allie likes chips with all those strange flavors like nacho cheese, barbecue, sour cream and chili. She won’t eat chips that don’t turn her teeth orange.
Allie reported that she ate most of the food I packed during lunch and then finished off the chips and candy bar on the bus ride home.
The lunch I fixed for Allie seemed kind of bland compared to the “chic” meals they talked about in that newspaper story.
That writer who said taking lunch to work is gaining popularity said her meal that day included pasta with herbs, mozzarella cheese, olives and cold roasted carrots sprinkled with pumpkin seeds and chili flakes.
She said some of her co-workers brought things like cold Spanish omelet or mixed meze and flatbreads. She even mentioned beetroot risotto.
When I was in school, my mother usually made me peanut butter and mayhaw jelly sandwiches. Some days I got cold bologna and mayonnaise on white bread. I liked that but not as much as the sandwiches at home when she fried the bologna in a skillet.
I was always a little disappointed when I opened my brown bag and found Vienna sausage or potted meat sandwiches but I was hungry enough by lunch time to eat them.
Older guys laughed about my mother cutting the crust off my sandwiches and sending tomato soup in thermos cups and little cans of fruit cocktail with some lunches, but I never told her.
She packed leftover fried chicken, meatloaf and pork chops for my dad when we had it and things like fried Spam sandwiches or sardines and crackers other times.
Those sack lunches were good when we were hungry, but I was glad when they finally opened a lunchroom at our school.
They had great things like fish sticks, Spanish rice, Salisbury steak, milk in glass bottles and ice cream in tiny cups. I thought the days of brown bag school lunches from home were over.
Allie will be glad to hear that taking lunch to school and work is back in vogue. But she won’t be excited to learn that the new lunches include things like cold roasted carrots with pumpkin seeds and chili flakes.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES