By Jim Hagarty
2006
I was making my lunch for work on Wednesday and as I spread the peanut butter and raspberry jam on the slices of whole wheat bread – I admit it, I’m a health food maniac – I got thinking about all the many years of brown bagging I have done since the 1950s.
There were first, of course, the lunches at public school, nicely done up by Mom in a tin lunch box (plastic not having arrived on the scene at that time). Sometimes, what was contained within the box made it into my stomach, but sometimes it didn’t. Opening the box, in fact, was akin, on certain days, to parading a wildebeest in front of a ravenous pride of mangy lions: only the inedible portions would be left for me after the bullies got done ripping and tearing.
Hunger in schools is a hot topic nowadays, as well it should be, but it existed back in my day too, and in my case, not because provisions were not sent along on each day’s adventure in staying alive one more day in the jungle that could be the rural, one-room schoolhouse. Other days, eating lunch in the “cloak room” – who wears a cloak, any more? – with all the other boys, lunch time turned into a sort of middle-Eastern market where fruit, vegetables, meats and juices were exchanged amidst loud shouting and waving of arms.
It seemed to be a truism that the other guy’s lunch always seemed better, and so, we learned early how to swing some pretty good deals. The dealers, however, were not always on equal footing, Grade 8’s, for example, offering swaps with the innocent chaps from grades one and two. I cannot remember specifically, but I am sure I took part in a few of these shameless swindles somewhere along the line.
Lunches then, as they still are, were rated on the goodies quotient – what quantity and quality of cookies and other sweets made it into our lunchboxes. At certain times of the year, after Halloween, Christmas and Easter, the haul could be counted on to be pretty good.
Brown bagging lost its appeal in high school, replaced instead by $1.25 or so of “lunch money” left on the counter and grabbed as we ran out the door. This was enough funds for not only a meal in the cafeteria, but a chocolate bar at the “tuck shop”. Later, however, some of the food got edged out as the cigarettes, at 45 cents a pack, made their arrival on the scene.
One member of my family, who still carried a brown bag to school, unfortunately grabbed a wrong bag in his haste one morning and ended up with a bag of cat scraps that day, food stuffs we affectionately called swill. The cats always looked back on that day with fondness as their lunch prospects took a sudden, if temporary, spike in quality.
Opportunities to make my own lunch in university, assuming they were ever there, were never taken and subs and pizza became dietary staples. I shudder to think of the money that flowed freely from my pockets in those days.
Then there were summer jobs – house painting, truck driving, factories, construction – where lunch bags reappeared. The same old anticipation of each day’s lunch in the construction shack or factory lunch room that was felt in public school returned on those jobs, as did the same old disappointment as reality set in. Envy of what the other guys had spread out before them was also a constant curse.
For the last almost 30 years, economic necessity has kept me pretty well chained to the brown bag, which has probably not been such a bad thing. Had my pockets been bulging with extra cash all this time and I could have dined in restaurants three times a day, especially those of the fast-food variety, I might well not be here to write about this.
An hour from the time of this writing, I’ll open my current lunch box, a big, solid red and white affair that looks like one of those special containers medics carry organs in on their way to a transplant, and I’ll spread out on my desk my sandwich, a banana, a glass of milk, a yogurt fruit bottom but most importantly, four caramel candies and a few chocolate chips. And, out of habit, I’ll check out what my co-workers brought and wish I’d had that instead.
All, that is, except for the caramels which l will jealously guard for myself, as any other self-respecting goodies hoarder would do.
