School Lunches : The Sour Thermos and other Lunch Pail Tales

When I was in the second grade, my father took a sabbatical from teaching and my mother went back to school. This was to be a bad year for me in the pergola, the outdoor eating area at school. It was the year my father packed my lunches.

I had been taking my lunch to school for only a year, but I already knew how much rode on both content and presentation--the food and the lunch box. Daily, one risked humiliation. Lunch boxes were emblematic of one’s allegiances in life, be it Barbie, rockets, polka dots or Bozo. Basically thin metal boxes with plastic handles, lunch boxes were possibly more important than clothes.

I had two: a plaid square box, very unassuming; and a flimsy vinyl thing with poodles on it. The vinyl poodle box was a gift--my mother never would have bought it, since our family disdained poodles as vain, elitist dogs--but the box had the distinction of being unique in the pergola. No one had a lunch box even remotely like it, and some of the cool girls admired it, although one of them said it looked like a purse, a definite put-down since she insinuated I was possibly too out of it to grasp the distinction between purse and lunch box. (Little did we know that 30 years later, the hippest girls would intentionally be carrying our now-vintage boxes as handbags.)

My sister had the best lunch box. It was the standard lunch box shape with that domed-lid Thermos compartment, only it was painted like a red barn, complete with white half-timbers. She says there were farm animals inside, but I inherited the box and I sure don’t remember them.

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Even before my father took over lunch-packing, I’d had some problems in that area. In the first grade, I’d already noticed my box didn’t contain the conventional, desirable goods. While some kids had sandwiches of peanut butter and jelly or Oscar Mayer luncheon meats, I had bread filled with livery liverwurst, salmon salad or dried “chipped beef.”

I hated the salmon salad’s little round bones, which ground to dust as you chewed them, but worst of all was the cold tongue sandwich, the meat fatty, its edges nubbled with taste buds. The only mustard my mother stocked was the brown, coarse-grained German stuff. Oh, how I yearned for perfect rounds of baloney, yellow mustard and those amazing, perfect squares of individually wrapped American cheese.

How this burning desire for store-bought consistency insinuates itself in 6- and 7-year-olds, I cannot say. It seemed to come from television, which I didn’t watch regularly. But those who did watch it knew the best brands and educated us through their contempt. My parents, of course, considered my longing for white bread and Oscar Mayer bologna as signs that I was caving in to the worst kind of consumer-oriented peer pressure. I, of course, saw it as a matter of fitting in or being consigned to abject loneliness--in simpler terms, a matter of life or death.

The interior of the sandwich was only a small fraction of my problem. Bread was the bigger, more visible thing. My father had a wheat allergy, so we never, never, never had plain white bread in the house. We had corn rye and pumpernickel rye that my father picked up from great eastside Jewish bakeries: big, thick, mismatching ovals of bread encrusted with caraway seeds and coarse cornmeal. If I was really lucky, he’d bring home a loaf of challah for my mother, which sometimes actually came in a standard loaf shape and could pass in the pergola as almost-acceptable egg bread.

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In the first grade, these breads and sandwich fillings caused me agony enough with my peers, and nobody ever, ever traded sandwiches with me. But at least my mother had some vague sense of presentation: her bread slices matched, she cut my sandwiches in half, she’d peel a carrot.

When my father took over making our lunches, all such niceties vanished. I’d open my box to find whole, hairy carrots and celery with leaves. Fruit was never cut. There would be a bruised, brown Bartlett pear or banana. (I walked to school, banging my lunch box against my leg the whole way.)

I found sandwiches made with one big slice of bread and a hard hump of heel. I got chunks--not slices--of Cheddar cheese and Saltine crackers. I got last night’s oven-barbecued chicken, its juices hideously jelled. In the spring, I faced uneven slabs of matzo and cream cheese, or matzo and butter and jelly.

One day, my father gave me Saltines and a tin of sardines. Even if I had wanted to eat whole, oily, dead little fish in front of my classmates, I lacked the dexterity to work the key until well into adulthood.

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Milk was a nickel a carton and you were supposed to finish it--aides picked up cartons and jiggled them before letting you leave for the playground. I was generally considered a good, trustworthy girl, so most aides took my word when I said I’d finished my milk. I remember great satisfaction in tossing a nearly full carton into the trash can.

Then there were Thermos bottles. Thermoses always leaked. If they didn’t leak all over the lunch box, soaking sandwiches in milk or juice, they leaked when I tried to get the lid off or pour. My mother told us to rinse out our Thermoses the moment we got home from school. I never remembered. Rinsing out a Thermos first thing after coming home was simply too much to ask. Thus I remember well the hot, sour smell of an unwashed Thermos, and also that sickening, swishy sound of a broken Thermos full of milk.

Other children, of course, had wonderful lunches. The true elite of the lunch hour I rarely saw: Those were the kids whose parents gave them money to eat in the school cafeteria.

But in the pergola, Janice Kanemitsu reigned supreme. Her sandwiches were perfect: baloney and cheese with a thin leaf of pale iceberg lettuce on white bread cut on the diagonal and wrapped, not in a wax paper bag but in real cellophane. She also had seeded, quartered apples. Snowballs or Twinkies or wedges of cake that looked just like Duncan Hines commercials. Adorable miniature bags of Laura Scudder’s potato chips. She even had Kool-Aid in her Thermos.

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Of course, I did not have the most degrading school lunches--not by a long shot. My sister, who was forever on a diet, had it worse. My mother believed that bread was fattening, so, though my sister never had to endure the weird bread humiliation, she did get her lunch meat in a greasy wad in a wax paper bag.

And then there were the Gordon boys, who were so poor they couldn’t buy milk and often had eaten their lunches en route to school, which caused aides to dig in their own purses and send the boys off to the cafeteria. The Gordon boys once brought the worst and most amazing lunch I had ever seen. Having devoured their sandwiches first thing out of the house, they had, on the way to school, refilled their rumpled sacks with hunks of chewy tar from where road workers were putting in a new street. At noon, the Gordons pulled from their bags what looked like patent leather rocks. They pulled the tar like stiff taffy, twisted off bite-sized hunks and were chewing away happily, telling everyone their mom had packed this lunch, when aghast aides arrived on the scene.

By the time I was in the fourth grade, both my mother and father were working, which, in terms of my school lunch, proved to be a blessing. Since my mother had to rush out the door by 7:30 a.m., she quickly discovered the virtues of packaged items. I didn’t get Laura Scudder’s potato chips, I got off-brand chips in a plaid bag and raisins in cute little boxes and Twinkie-like cakes. But at least I was in the running. My sister, who was denied all such fattening items, says that her school lunches improved immeasurably when she started waking up early and stealing lunch money from my mother’s purse.

By the fifth grade, I was making my own lunch, coring my own apples and cutting my own sandwiches on the diagonal. By junior high school, lunch paraphernalia was not nearly so crucial to my well-being. Now the battle was to make Mom buy me shirts with elbow patches and pointy-toed lace-up shoes.

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I don’t believe all those weird lunches did me any harm. They were merely, like word problems in math, one of the more difficult parts of my education. I didn’t rebel; in fact, indoctrination with good food seems to have worked. When I went away to college, I had a brief, unsatisfying fling with white bread and the convenience foods my mother never touched--I ate them long enough to know that my mother was right.

Today, few foods faze me. A good mortadella is as close as I come to bologna. I happen to love boiled tongue.

It could have been worse. A friend of mine, Kathy, hated vegetables as a child, so her mother filled her lunch box with nothing but junk food: cookies, chips, those little packages of crackers and cheese product. Twenty years later, Kathy fills her daughter’s lunch box with sunflower seeds, dried fruit and Adelle Davis’ nutritional yeast drinks.

At a school function, the principal said to Kathy: “Are you the woman who puts such disgusting things in her daughter’s lunch? Well, she doesn’t eat them.”