This text is part of the special Pleasures notebook
They make many parents cringe and fuel many office conversations. Whether they bring back good or less good memories, lunches and their preparation are part of the daily life of many people for a good part of the year. A little step back to understand (and perhaps appreciate a little more) their evolution until today.
Popularized in the 19th centurye century under the impetus of the industrial revolution, the worker’s lunch, first carried around in a bucket, then in tin boxes, quickly spread across North America. In 1935, the Mickey Mouse lunch box was a hit, but it was especially in the post-war period that the market exploded. In the United States alone, there were 120 million lunch boxes made of metal, then plastic, which were sold between the 1950s and 1970s, coinciding precisely with the gradual entry of women into the job market and the new need, for many children, to have dinner at school.
Two inventions of the 20th centurye century also made it easier to eat hot meals at school: the thermos, patented in 1904, which flooded the market in the 1950s, and the microwave oven, a military invention from the interwar period which made its entry into homes and cafeterias at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s.
Other times, other manners
Before the habit of taking lunch to school became common practice, children had the option of eating in the school refectory or cafeteria, or returning home to eat, often by their own means. At lunchtime, in the Coaticook of the 1950s, Claudette remembers that she would go home every midday, where she would sit down with her brothers and sisters around a hot meal prepared by their mother, for more than ten people. “We ate some, minced meat!” she exclaims. Dumplings, shepherd’s pie, macaroni and spaghetti with cane sauce too. Then on Friday, we ate fish. But I especially loved good McIntosh apples. That, and banana slices in 35% cream with sugar on top! »
At the same time, in Longueuil, Daniel and his brothers had to trek 5 kilometers round trip to get home for dinner. But in 9e year (2e secondary school), the road to the new school run by the Brothers of Christian Instruction had become too long. The teenagers then left in the morning with sandwiches of ham on the bone passed through the meat grinder. “At Saint-Jude school, there was a huge cafeteria where we could eat our lunch, and then we could enjoy the gymnasium full of Mississippi games, so we loved that,” Daniel remembers.
In Outremont, Madeleine also wore out her boots. Forty minutes of walking every lunchtime to return home to eat the remains of the night before’s supper, except for the year he was eight, when his mother enrolled him in meals in the school refectory. “We had to go down the stairs in a row, class by class, and we waited in line for the nun to take her little clapboard. Clack! And there we could pull out our chairs — without dragging our legs on the floor. Once seated, we waited to take turns filling our plates, then we had to eat in silence and listen to the reading of religious texts. We didn’t really listen, but we had to be quiet, and if we laughed, we got reprimanded. We often ate creamed corn with potatoes, and, horror, fish on Fridays. » Madeleine still remembers the worst meal served there: “fried eggs for the Pope’s Day, yellow and white like the colors of the Vatican, but with the white gooey. There must have been toast and canned beans with that. We couldn’t say anything, but we all looked at each other, eyes wide. »
So we can put it into perspective: nowadays, between allergens, intolerances, nutritional and environmental concerns and children’s preferences, preparing lunches can sometimes seem a bit… complicated! But let’s face it, at least we can eat hot food, we have the right to laugh and, if we don’t want to, we don’t have to eat fish on Friday!
This content was produced by the Special Publications team at Duty, relating to marketing. The writing of the Duty did not take part.