The Lunch Box Through the Ages

For most of human history, people who worked away from home carried their midday meal in whatever container was to hand. Farm labourers wrapped bread and cheese in a cloth, and in parts of northern England, miners took their food underground in metal tins with tight lids, which protected it from coal dust and from the rats that lived in the tunnels. These tins, often shaped to hold a particular kind of sandwich, were so important that a miner who lost his might go hungry until the end of a twelve-hour shift.

In the nineteenth century, as factories drew workers away from their homes, the carried lunch became a feature of daily life for millions. In some industrial towns, children were employed to deliver hot meals in baskets to their fathers at work, collecting them from home and arriving at the factory gate just as the midday bell rang. Elsewhere, workers ate cold food they had brought with them, as few employers provided anywhere to heat it, and canteens did not become common until the early twentieth century.

Other countries developed their own traditions. In India, for example, a remarkable system grew up in which cooked lunches were collected from workers' homes each morning and delivered to their offices by a network of carriers, using a code of colours and symbols to make sure that each tin reached the right person. In Japan, carefully arranged boxed meals have long been regarded as a form of art, and parents may spend considerable time preparing a box that is attractive as well as nutritious.

The lunch box as a children's item is a more recent development. When free or cheap school meals were introduced in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, partly because of concern about the poor health of young people, many children ate a hot dinner at school rather than bringing food from home. Those who did bring their own food were sometimes made to eat it in a separate room. The packed lunch never disappeared, however, and in the 1950s and 1960s manufacturers saw an opportunity. Brightly painted metal boxes decorated with characters from television programmes and comics became highly fashionable, and children often chose a box as much for its picture as for its practical qualities.

Metal boxes eventually gave way to plastic, which was cheaper, lighter and less likely to cause injuries in the playground. Collectors now pay high prices for well-preserved metal boxes from this period, particularly those in their original condition with the matching flask. One collector in the town of Langworth, who owns more than four hundred boxes, says that buyers are mostly adults who remember the boxes from their own childhood and want to recapture something of that time. Historians note that the designs followed the fashions of children's television so closely that a box can often be dated to within a year or two.

What goes inside the box has changed too. For decades, a typical packed lunch consisted of sandwiches, a piece of fruit and perhaps a biscuit. In recent years, however, studies of school packed lunches have found that many contain more sugar and salt than is recommended, and that only a small proportion meet the nutritional standards that apply to school dinners. As a result, some schools have introduced rules on what children may bring, banning sweets and fizzy drinks, though such rules can cause tension with parents who feel that they, rather than the school, should decide what their children eat. Many parents now look for ideas online, where photographs of elaborate packed lunches are widely shared.

Meanwhile, the lunch box has found a new audience among adults. Concerns about the cost of buying lunch every day, together with growing awareness of the waste created by disposable packaging, have led many office workers to bring food from home. Manufacturers now sell boxes with separate sections for different foods, and containers that keep food warm for several hours, and some even have built-in cool packs to keep salads fresh. In some ways, the modern adult carrying a carefully packed lunch to work is not so different from the miner with his tin, although the reasons for doing so have changed considerably.