Really.

I don't remember which lunch boxes I had, but the worst nutrition offense we got was peanut butter and brown sugar sandwiches. I also remember kids giggling about the "homo" on our milk even though none of us knew what homo meant. It was the 60s.

Apparently, they ate what they could, and sugar sandwiches were somehow a part of her nutrition pyramid.

I actually loved them, and my friends in school would trade me some of their lunch box goodies for one of my sandwiches.

No wonder dentists loved us.

I remember my kids had "Star Wars" and "GI Joe" lunch boxes though. They were metal and they would rust. Ugh.

My mom picked it out for me. Usually, though, I ate the hot lunch, which cost thirty cents. Twenty-five for the meal and five cents for the milk. The cafeteria workers made everything from scratch, even the bread. You could smell it cooking all morning and by lunch time you were starving. My favorite was spaghetti. It. Was. Yummy.

At least my mom didn't pack American cheese and mayo on white bread like my friend Doris found regularly in her Barbie box.

(wish I still had mine )

I hated that thing until me and a friend, who had the plastic Barbie one, got in a fight. She hit me on the head with her plastic Barbie box and I hit her hard with that metal thing.

She told her mom and I got in big trouble.....But she was a brat and it gave me a brief moment of satisfaction.

With all their delightful selections. Most of my school days she was working and expecting my older sisters to get breakfast for the younger kids was all she could count on. (Breakfast was usually buttered toast and hot chocolate made from instant milk powder mixed dry with Nestles Milk Chocolate powder. mom would mix it up and we'd stir it into hot tap water. Once I had real hot chocolate I could never drink that stuff again!)

The item our school lunch ladies created that was most hated was prune whip - made with canned prune juice and instant milk powder. Somehow they managed to beat it unto a fluffy texture and got this lavender colored stuff that tasted worse than it sounds.

I wish I would have hung on to it..

In early elementary school I used to draw the Jupiter 2 firing lasers at anything I could think of. The girl seated next to me laughed when I drew a likeness of our teacher and had the Jupiter 2 blast her to (Doctor Zachary) smithereens.

http://www.lostintoys.com/museum/featlunc.html

... they lost the NFL championship three times in a row around when I started school. Circa 1962. Not that I particularly liked the Giants, but I did love football, and in those days, the Steelers were not exactly a team likely to show up on a lunchbox.

Mostly I just brown-bagged it, because I would always break the thermos within a few days of starting. Until I started using the steel Stanley thermoses. Then, I just lost them.

-- Mal

My mom bought it for me in first grade, and made me use it all the way through 8th grade, to my chagrin.

and it always held bologna and mayo on wheat with two cookies. Mom would put milk in the thermos, but I despised milk and invariably poured it out. Eventually her drunk ass stopped bothering with lunch so I got to eat cafeteria food.

I got a brown paper sack and I was expected to return home with it.

My parents had a mess of kids they couldn't really afford, traditional Catholic style. My dad had a union job. Lunch boxes were not in the budget, except for my youngest sibling, the baby of the family. (I'd changed his diapers...) My parents had some "disposable income" after the rest of us had left, so my baby brother had a few fancy lunch boxes, and some brand name clothing too.

My parents ran off to be full time artists when they retired, and they left my baby brother, in high school, on their small farm. But he still had break even, which is more than my parents had expected from from any of the rest of us. Leave or stay, both were difficult choices. Two of my siblings fled home at sixteen to work. I quit high school at sixteen and went to college, back when college was nearly free. Seriously, I got state grants for my textbooks, and my rent for scummy student housing was eighty dollars a month which I could make loading and unloading a few trucks full of furniture.

My brother and his girlfriend (long married) rented out rooms and trailer trash parking spaces to his friends, acquaintances, and coworkers, becoming much better business people than I am.

My parents were strict and made me study my a$$ off. I had to be in by 8:30 on school nights all the way through high school.

We had food and a place to sleep, a few chores, but beyond that we were on our own.

When I quit high school, and the first time I got kicked out of college, my parents didn't have any questions. That was life. At my lowest I got to sleep there. I ate a lot of food I grew myself.

My kids were crazy straight A+ valedictorian high school students who have graduated from excellent colleges and are building their own lives.

I am in awe.

a Red Ryder book.

Hello Kitty Bento Box!


My mom got it for me at Japantown.

I love Hello Kitteh! It cracked me up from the first time I saw it -- her --)

Lol!

Not that I had a great affinity for that cartoon character.

I do remember loosing it-then finding it a week later. Sitting on a pole by the barn.
Sitting in the sun full of food in the hot sun made a mess of the inside.

But I remember having this one:




But I wish I'd had this one:

Planet of the Apes and Speed Racer in elementary school.

I do remember the thermoses rarely ever made it a whole month before breaking the glass inside.

I ended up buying lunch at school more often than carrying it but in Jr High and High school I mostly had paper bags when I didn't buy. PB&J or baloney. Mom worked at Frito-Lay and ITT Continental Baking company (Hostess) for a lot of my school years so we always had good snacks.

here's what mine looked like:

Lunch was a sandwich, an apple, banana, or orange and something sweet for desert. Our school didn't have hot lunch.