If your children do not stay for school dinners it is very likely that they will possess a lunch box in which to carry their packed lunch. Packed lunches vary according to the purse strings and the tastes of the child it belongs to and so too vary the actual lunch box.
A Typical Lunch Box
Kids Lunch Boxes come in all shapes and sizes from plain Tupperware to the most snazzy of designs. However what your children’s lunch box says about them is not what is on the outside but essentially what is contained within.
But where did the idea of a packed lunch come from in the first place.
Hard to believe the first lunch boxes were actually tobacco tins! At the beginning of the twentieth century, a packed lunch was the order of the day for workers who were unable to travel home for lunch because work was too far away.
The lunch box (as we know it) began as a useful and lightweight vessel for schoolchildren to carry their lunch or snacks. Kids Lunch boxes were generally fashioned with images of favourite cartoon or film characters and made of plastic.
In Mumbai, India the packed lunch is better known as Tiffin but is not put together and taken into work but is prepared and delivered by a food service provider called a Dabbawallah (or TiffinWallahs). For over a hundred years, office workers have enjoyed the provision of freshly cooked lunches delivered to their place of work as opposed to carrying in the prepared lunch themselves.
Back to our school children and their packed lunches, why are kids lunch boxes so popular when we in Great Britain have the school dinners? School dinners have been around since the 1870’s brought in to combat child malnutrition. In many cases the school dinners was to be the only source of a nutritional meal that some children from poor families would have. Over the years however, school dinners have become something of a figure of ridicule with comments about lumpy custard, spam fritters, turkey twizzlers and such like. As a consequence, parents prefer to prepare their children’s lunches themselves.
There are many views on what makes a good packed lunch and arguments whether it should contain healthy food that may not seem all that appealing or should the kids lunch box contain food that will definitely get eaten but doesn’t rate too highly for nutritious content.
We are in health conscious times and find that schools (having got school dinners wrong) are now telling parents what not to put in their children’s lunchboxes! The cheek! Surely, at the end of the day, who knows better what a child will eat than the parent?