That Horrible Pen

The title is hyperbole—I did eat the Lunchable—but it captures some of my feelings about the experience nonetheless. I have no memory of eating a Lunchable as a kid, but I am convinced that I couldn’t not have asked for one at some point. They seem to me now like the food equivalent of a toy, or at least an exercise in primarily visual appeal. I was probably, on some level, when I didn’t not ask for one during a grocery store run, interested in the clout it would have conferred upon me in the school lunchroom, and/or the sense of “being like the other kids.” Not that my memories suggest they were swimming in Lunchables either. If my mother turned my request down, which would definitely have been the case, then that’s because, even if she didn’t know it at the time, she could see through the flashy… rhetoric of the Lunchable to uncover its sickly, unsatisfying truth: The money was for the branding, not the food. I was a kid who went to school with lunches packed by a human person, in my...