It's A Little Treasure Chest - Lunch Box

Imagine you are a little girl living in the 1940s. You are readying yourself for school, making sure you are dressed neatly and that you have everything you need. Of course, you also have to ensure you have your lunchbox packed with good food to give you energy and enthusiasm to work in your classes. You have a lovely little lunch box, covered in black leather and with a real metal clasp to keep it shut. When your Mummy gave it to you for your first day of school you felt so grown up!

When I showed the children this small, black lunch box their reaction was quite funny. They did not recognise the box as a lunch box, instead thinking it was some sort of ‘treasure chest, for keeping the best treasure safe’. To the children, lunch boxes are plastic, or even just an insulated cool bag to keep lunch cold and they had trouble imagining a girl carrying this little box to school. Also, they thought the box was ‘very small – it wouldn’t fit my lunch inside’.

Essentially, lunch boxes are containers for holding food and they have a history dating back to the 19^th century. With the rise of industry and more people working away from their homes, some way to carry lunch to and from work needed to be found. Lunch often consisted of a hearty meal which could include pie, vegetables and hard boiled eggs, so the container needed to be hardy. Workers packed their food into containers such as tobacco and biscuit tins and these were the first real ‘lunch boxes’. Others used a woven basket or even a wooden box if they were wealthy enough to afford such a luxury. It was not until the 1860s that people began to create specially designed lunch boxes, and not until the 20^th century that they really began to become popular.

The first commercially produced lunch boxes often looked rather like a metal picnic basket with printed scenes of children at play and other childhood themes. Although for much of the latter 20^th century, and even today, lunch boxes were associated with characters from popular culture, these early lunch boxes were much simpler. It was not until 1935 that the first lunch box featuring a popular character, Mickey Mouse was produced and it was not until even later, with the coming of television, that lunch boxes featuring such characters became the norm. Metal lunch boxes continued to be the norm until the 1980s when cheap, moulded plastic became much more common.