After carefully preparing my Grandson's lunch box last week, memories of my own lunchbox came flooding back!!
We all had a blue or red lunch box with a white lid, the perfect size for one sandwich. Neatly wrapped in Wax Wrap, (no ziplock and plastic packets in those frugal post WW 2 days,) our sandwiches, almost always without exception, were spread with a thin layer of Sun Fruit Jam, maybe with a smidgin of margarine near pay day.....
Occasionally the dreaded Sandwich Spread made an appearance, Mother thought it was healthy as it was made from veggies, we thought it looked like vomit!!
Our only drink was diluted Mazoe Orange, made from Mazoe Orange Concentrate, loads of sugar, and water. Always in a rectangular plastic bottle, with a screw top. None of these fancy, exotic thermo flask type things with extraordinary apparatus on the top to prevent spillage...nah, our bottles were expected to leak.!!
My Grandson's lunch box in Botswana is tiered, with one sandwich sized compartment and then smaller compartments for strawberries, carrot sticks, cucumber slices, rounds of cheese in the red waxed skin, grapes, etc.
Optional extras are salami sticks, pretzels, cheese sticks, dried apple slices, olives, dill pickles, small packets of chip stix, cheese straws, and on Fridays, his school allows candy!! The supermarkets are capitalising on the lunch box hysteria by providing lunch box sized groceries, speciality miniature cucumbers, tiny wedges of pre packaged cheese, small naartjies, miniature apples and so on and so forth.
When he was at school in Sweden, things were a lot stricter. No candy allowed at any time, and absolutely no peanuts.. The school teacher would even patrol the lunch break checking to see if one's lunch box was healthy and dietary compliant!!
Lunch breaks at modern schools are a smorgasbord of delights, but I ask you with tears in my eyes, which busy Mom has time for these creative lunch boxes