East-coast ivory-tower liberal-elite graduate-school-graduate tries and fails to eat a Lunchable
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 snug little lunchbox, accompanied
by a personal note written on a slip of paper alongside a tiny print-out of one
of the original 151 Pokémon, courtesy of a computer program we owned.
Having peered inside one for myself, I see “Lunchable” not as a lunch-like product but as an aggregator of lunch-like products—much like my mother was but without the personal touch. As a kid, I was ignorantly requesting a worse lunching experience because it looked pretty. Maybe that was also genuinely convenient for some kids—an upgrade from no packed lunch at all—but it wouldn’t have been for me.
 |
I don’t understand the
decision-making process behind the cartoons on this packaging: Why a tiny
flame? Who is that woman supposed to be? (She looks too… specific to be
a generic design.) And why does the tiger seem to be the one announcing that
this box contains “12g of Protein per serving”? It feels
random, like these were just icons/stickers the designers had access to and
then plopped down in a rush, and that stand out in contrast to the overall lack
of panache. It’s not a dissimilar impression to what one feels re. the contents
of the meal, as we’ll see momentarily… |
Now, I am struck by how surface-level the branding’s appeal is: Upon opening the box, I was gifted the sight of unremarkable bare cardboard, along with 3 other impressions, 2 of which I will enumerate immediately:
- “Man, this unexciting water bottle sure does feel like it takes up fully a third of this box.”
- “Man, those sure are two Hershey’s ‘Kisses’ rolling around loose in this box.”
The sum total or perhaps average of these impressions
was “disappointment.” There is no aesthetic unity among these items—You’ve got
one brand of candy (Hershey) and one brand of water (Absopure) and one brand of
flavored mix for said water (Kool-Aid) and one brand of “light” “Mayo” (Kraft) and
one brand of potato chip (Pringles), and then the brand-forward plastic packet
of meat and cheese (Oscar Mayer/Kraft) and the unbranded plastic packet
containing the bun. Lunchables seem like,
in the grand tradition of contemporary American business, a conniving middle-man between consumers and
the actual products, as you’re paying them to collect the things for you and put their
logo on the package. Perhaps the end-result does credibly resemble a facsimile
of a human-packed lunch with regard to the odds-and-ends of it all, like a Mrs.
Lunchables made a list and went shopping for these items and keeps them around
the house and dumps them all together into your box that she sends you off to school with.
It’s just that the experience is also obviously lesser (see the cardboard and
maybe the disappointment of discovering that Big, Meaty box was mostly water
and also how there’s no avoiding the feeling that the semi-thick sealed plastic
pouch of bun so clearly recalls mass production, uncaring packaging).
And here’s
impression 3: “Man, this plastic pouch of meat and cheese sure is puffy.”
And in my house, we translate a puffy package as Do Not Eat. In fairness to
Mrs. Lunchables, the odds are not in your favor when you pack
God-only-knows-illion lunches like this, and the expiration date was coming up
fast, and I’m almost certain this Lunchable came to me from a discount food
dispensary where it might not have been stored properly. Still, I let that
expiration date creep past me while the opened Lunchable sat in the
refrigerator and I considered the demerits of not eating my assigned
meat and cheese. I wanted a Lunchable experience, see, and while I had
other meat and cheese (and mayo, just to be safe), could I really hold up my
head and say I’d “eaten” the Lunchable if I didn’t eat (without quote marks)
all of it?
I did not
eat the puffy package, which has grown puffier still as I’ve held onto the
remains of the Lunchable for reference while writing. I instead made do with my
“normal” deli meat (chicken) and pre-sliced cheese product (torn up
into bun-appropriate strips), and jar-interred mayonnaise. My impression of the
bun visually was that it looked like your usual hot-dog-ular deal. “Default”
coloration and texture. Taste confirmed this hypothesis: inoffensive, maybe a
bit less flavorful than a non-Lunchable bun of a similar make and model, and
certainly a bit denser. I didn’t so much taste the bun as notice its
substance in my mouth. For added palatability, I traded off bites of sandwich
and Pringles. This worked out reasonably evenly and well. The Pringles were
Pringles. The old adage about not being able to stop after popping (peeling, in
this case) still held true.
It was with
the drink where I actually failed, a little: I (naturally) wanted every drop
that was coming to me and assumed that I simply needed to open the little water
bottle and flavor pouch separately and then Combine (probably shake, with the
lid put back on the former). I did have the sense to undertake this mixing
procedure over the sink but not quite enough to know with a cold certainty in
advance that adding more contents to an already over-full container would cause
it to over-flow. Thus chastened, I sat the bottle down in the sink, my pouch of
powder not quite depleted. I put the pouch down beside the sink and put the lid
on the bottle and shook it some. It was very much still over-full, I could see
from how the water was clearly flush with the underside of the plastic lid, but
it did not run over immediately upon re-open-age. I drank some of this
home-made Kool-Aid and found it flavor-light, if not -less, though that was
more or less as expected for the brand. It struck me then that I
probably should have pre-drunk some of that (boring! unflavored!) water
before putting in the powder in order to make room, but I couldn’t imagine a
kid doing that, and the question that nagged at me was how this process went down
in cafeterias across the country. I put in the rest of the powder and finally
noticed that my initial attempt to pour it into the bottle had brought the pouch’s ragged snoot
in contact with the water and that there was a little dam of gelled flavoring
stopping up the opening and extending back in a-ways. I used the pinky of my
right hand to extract and consume this unintentional goo, which was much more
concentrated and, consequently, flavor-full. My prize was a stained fingertip which
still looks, as of this (original) writing, over-full of blood. (A cool enough
special effect, had I been nine years old.) I debated wiping the bottle off to
take it elsewhere for sipping, but I ultimately left it sitting open in the
sink and picked it up and put it back down in there as I drank without much
attempt at conservation. I took a break to eat the Kisses, which was an
unremarkable process with non-noteworthy results. I ultimately found that the
“bottom” of the water bottle had more flavor than the “top.”
The small
mess with the water and flavoring was definitely the highlight of my Lunchable
experience. While I’m obviously aware there are other varieties out there—with
both different packaging and different contents—my final evaluation is as I
suggested already, paragraphs ago: unremarkable. My flesh and blood mother was
right to see this as a scam, assuming I once asked her for one and she turned
me down, which almost certainly probably did happen at some point. Maybe
renting out a theater to eat this Packed-Lunch-like would have enhanced it, but
I somehow doubt that, assuming you have the critical faculties to separate one
bit of an experience from the other and don’t just let everything you see and
think and smell and hear and taste and touch roll up into a combination ball of
living that you then toss around fondly without a care. It didn’t
matter that the box was that (long-desired?) attractive yellow or that it had
the Lunchables branding: What mattered was the food inside, which was thoroughly
“meh.” It was Lunchappointing.
(And I
FAILED to open the box properly, I realized in the revision/editing of this
piece—Like an illiterate beast, I went right for the utilitarian, big box flaps
rather than the cool designated press, lift, tear spot. In doing so, I rendered
the splayed-open product that extra bit less Aesthetic, though I will still
contend it did not need my assistance to fail in that regard.)
