The food that inspires our lunch nostalgia differs quite a bit between generations. While you may fondly remember a sandwich of Billy Bear ham and cheese, someone born just a few years earlier might dream only of Wagon Wheels.
An article on metro.co.uk takes a look at how kids’ packed lunches have transformed over the decades. They reckon that children’s packed lunches tend to be far more nutritionally healthy today than they were 50 years ago…
Here we have a classic seventies collection of peanut butter and jam sandwiches, some cubes of cheese, cheese puffs, pineapple slices, a carton of orange juice, and a few sweets. Those cubes of cheese with pineapple are giving off major house party vibes.
Yes, those are indeed Space Raiders – a delightful pairing with a cheese and pickle sandwich. 80s kids also enjoyed some apple slices, a Wagon Wheel (I’m team jam), and another carton of orange juice.
90s kids will remember enjoying a ham sandwich, likely with Hula Hoops, some animal shaped biscuits, a Penguin, a jelly fruit pot, and a Capri-Sun.
If you were a kid in the early 2000s, you probably enjoyed a lunch of a tuna and sweetcorn sandwich, a tube of yoghurt, some Pringles (you had a sparkly Pringles snack pot, of course), string cheese, and some fruit flavoured water. Your mum probably chucked in some apple slices and grapes to make it ‘healthy’… plus a Kit-Kat for pudding.
So here’s what the young people are eating these days: a chicken salad sandwich with fancy ‘thins’ rather than standard bread, carrot sticks, a handful of crisps, a chocolate finger, tropical fruits, and yoghurt covered raisins. According to the study of 2,000 parents by Wren Kitchens, the majority of parents consider children’s packed lunches today to be healthier than when they were young, and what’s included now is more nutritious than the food found in packed lunches in the 70s.
