The searching for various ways to make take away meals attractive, nutritious, and easy to pack will begin this week.
Ice packed and insulated soft sided lunch bags bulging with easy to open reusable containers being carried to and from school will be once again pulled from the back of the cupboard in order for another influx of carefully carved fruit, pizza bites, and juice cartons to be placed lovingly inside.
There will be a mass buying of puddings, fruit roll ups, individually wrapped crackers, cheese, and bits of yogurt covered nuts and raisins. Juice Boxes and GoMilk containers will be added.
All this thinking about lunches and the manner in which they are packed fills my mind, if not my stomach, with some heartwarming if not exactly Canadian Food Guide memories of some different sort of school lunches.
There were be no soft sided lunch kits. Instead only tin 'barn' shaped containers with hard sided snap closing with black handles would be used. Perhaps a name written in pen on a piece of white medical tape attached onto one side.
Secondly there were not any sort of store bought lunch snacks in the type wrapped in plastic in predetermined portions accompanied by a plastic stick or spoon. Instead perhaps a store bought lunchtime snack would be the Wagon Wheel .
Thirdly, non-refrigerated sandwiches of home grown sliced beef with mustard and pepper in slices of homemade bread made at 7 am and resting on a warm school shelf until noon would have a special tenderness to them that cannot be replicated, particularly if Miracle Whip is also been placed along with the mustard.
Besides the often opted for peanut butter and jam sandwiches, one can sometimes look forward to plain Tomato sandwiches again slathered with Miracle Whip and pepper, and yet again await consumption for 5 hours, uncooled , wapped in wax paper in a tin box.
Cheese slices of Velvetta lying between white bread and coloured margarine was also a safe bet.
Later perhaps as store bought food became more available the sandwiches made of Spam, Spic, Canned Chicken, and, of course, that type of round steak never to be denied-- the ever salty, high fat content piece of questionable meat-like substance called Bologna came to be the fare given to those of us from the country along with an air of sophisticated urbanity. These sandwiches were only be surpassed in chic mother imagination by cold wieners packed in a roll of wax paper with slices of homemade bread and mustard--a cold version of a hot dog.
Combine these type of school age consumables, especially if they are made with uniformity of store bought white bread, and packed in the modern coloured lunch kits depicting various television characters and one would be the student to be envied by all, every bit as much as one is with the latest iPhone or texting device of today.
Desserts would be, of course, homemade oatmeal cookies, chocolate cake with thick icing, or puffed wheat cake. After a few years the 'new' Rice Krispie cake started to appear.
Fruit may consist of oranges, apples, and plums in season.
Sometimes homemade jars of canned fruit may appear consisting of peaches, raspberries or rhubarb.
Wax paper would be reused is possible. Tin lunch kits would be washed daily and rinsed in scalding water and left to dry with the lid open to rest on the kitchen cupboard for the next day's culinary creations made with love and good intentions.
As most schools in the country did not have proper wells with adequate drinking water, students would have to often carry drinking water with them to school. The jars of water would languish alongside the sandwiches no matter what the temperature. The jars containing the water were often canning jars...sometimes their first purpose was something quite different...such as perhaps a jar for pickled herrings. This would make for an interesting combination in taste and satisfaction one hot June afternoon while riding my bike 2 1/2 miles home on a dirt road in the country.
