What was in your childhood lunchbox?

[DukeofEarlGrey]

Inspired by the 1980s lunchbox thread about the actual boxes... what did you have in them??

Mine was extremely consistent: sandwich, piece of fruit, carrot sticks and a ‘treat’ that varied but was always some kind of biscuit. My favourite were these things called Huggy Bears which was a little bag of biscuits with chocolate goo inside and bears stamped on the outside.

My lovely dad was in charge of lunch boxes and did this for me every day as well as a lunch for everyone else.

Cheese and cucumber sandwiches, fruit, a packet of quavers and either a jammy wagon wheel or a penguin.

Peanut butter sandwich, walkers ready salted crisps, club bar, and capri sun. I never ate the fruit

Chocolate spread sandwich on white bread, packet of crisps, penguin, yogurt (often chocolate mouse), squash in washed out pop bottle. Based on this, I think they had a point when they introduced pack lunch rules.

Marmite sandwich in sliced white bread and an apple with maybe a box of raisins as a treat. Envied some of the other kids but that’s just how it was.

Either a cheese, ham or meat/fish paste sandwich my mum used to buy unsliced bread and it was always cut unevenly. With a piece of home baked cake and an apple, pear or satsuma, only my dad was allowed bananas as they were considered expensive. We never had chocolate bars or crisps and I hated being different to everyone else at school who did have them.

@BrilliantBulb
Yes hot coffee in a thermos in winter or hot squash in winter. I used to sit there for ages because it was too hot to drink to start with.

Cold squash in lidded tupperware beaker in summer, which invariably leaked.

Early 90s:

Sandwich — usually ham, egg mayo, or chicken lettuce and mayo
Fruit — usually an apple, might be a pear or satsuma, occasionally grapes, sometimes a little pot of raisins
Sometimes a salty snack — Hula Hoops, Mini Cheddars, crisps or similar
Usually a pudding — Club, Penguin, 2 finger Kit Kat, or a chocolate pudding pot

No drink, we were usually given water at school (though sometimes we'd be told we couldn't have water as it was coming through brown…)

I never ever had a lunchbox as a child. I started primary in 1967 and went home for lunch or had a hot dinner at school on the odd occasion my mum was going to be out. At secondary I lived very close to the school and always went home.

Marmite sandwich and an apple.

Pitta bread filled with tuna or sometimes just liberally buttered inside and filled with finely chopped pepperami
Small tub of tzatziki
Small pot of chopped melon
Chocolate biscuit bar - usually a Gold Bar but often a club, penguin or trio.
Crisps for a playpiece - usually niknaks or monster munch.

In the autumn/winter I would have a flask of chicken noodle soup (made from packet mix) instead of the tzatiki and a satsuma instead of melon. Half a pitta rather than a whole one.

I'm from mixed Cypriot/Scottish parentage and I don't think this was ever more evident than in my 80s packed lunchbox. Everyone else thought my lunch was weird.

Either a dairylea and tomato soggy sandwich or a bloater paste sandwich (less soggy). A Tupperware cup of weak squash and if my mother had been in a good mood the evening before when she made my lunch I could get a club chocolate biscuit bar.

A sandwich and that was it. From what I can recall very few of us would even have had a drink.

@DinosApple

Sandwich, sometimes with that ham with a face on it (was it a bear or a boys face??) or cheese, fruit sometimes and hedgehog crisps. All in a My Little Pony lunchbox.

Billy Face

White bread with either Shiphams paste or luncheon meat (hated both and gave them to William) and either an apple or an orange. Brother's were far nicer due to them being boys!

I can't remember having anything other than a couple of sandwiches, maybe a banana or apple but definitely no 'snacks'.
Mind you the sandwiches would be quite filling as they would be rye bread with pate or salami (guess the country).

I hated eating at school.
My standard lunch was.
1 drink carton
1 digestive biscuit

If I was going through a good eating stage the digestive biscuit had a slice of cheese on it.

Dsis otoh used to take 3 large rolls filled with whatever meat was left over from the roast on Sunday, a sausage roll or two if we had them, a slice of homemade cake, a piece of fruit, a packet of crisps, sometimes a flask of soup, sometimes a chocolate biscuit, sometimes a bag of salad and a drink.

Both of us were normal size. Dm always hoped that if any teacher was concerned about the size of my lunch they'd look at dsis' before saying anything.

Cheese sandwich, tomato or apple or tangerine, club biscuit or penguin, water. Sometimes a carton of orange juice if very lucky.

Processed cheese slice and cucumber sandwich on white bread.

A multipack bag of crisps.

A tin of fruitini.

A bag of bears biscuits. (The forerunner of the mini biscuit bags you can get today from McVitie’s etc).

@foxgoosefinch

My mum was a knit-your-own-muesli type way before it got fashionable, so I always got:

• a cheese or tuna sandwich stuffed with cucumber and tomatoes on the crusty bits of wholemeal bread (of course, it always went a bit soggy )
• a Jordan’s muesli bar
• an apple
• water or very weak “hi-juice” low sugar orange squash
• for a treat I was allowed half a packet of Hedgehog Crisps.

I looked on green with envy at all my peers, who invariably got a carton of Um Bongo, jam sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off, a Babybel and a Penguin biscuit.

Aged 6 I would probably have killed for an Um Bongo

Ditto - oh how we laughed about hedgehog crisps being made out of real hedgehogs. I sometimes got some carob (ersatz chocolate) cake as a treat as well.

Have to say though, I preferred my wholemeal pitta filled with things like Greek salad to white sliced with jam or cheap ham.

Saying that, as soon as I left for uni I converted to a diet of white sliced with plastic cheese and value sausages.

I was born in the early 1980s. Sandwich on white sliced bread with meat paste, ham, luncheon meat, cheese or similar. I remember finally getting my mum to stop putting tuna (no Mayo) on my sandwich as it was never properly drained and so the bread always ended up soggy, which I hated. For about three years I just had a sandwich and a satsuma, plus a flask of weak squash, with a penguin or a couple of custard creams to be eaten at break. Like lots of other people I was always hungry and often envied kids with crisps and Mars bars in their lunchboxes which I never had as my mum wouldn’t have them in the house! As I got older there was a bit more variation thankfully, with the occasional quartered orange or apple.

My kids get a sandwich with ham, salami or meat paste (because that’s about all they’ll eat), carrot sticks or a mini box of raisins, and a bag of crisps, popcorn or mini cheddars.

@inigomontoyahwillcox Carob! I’d forgotten about carob until you mentioned it!! Yes, we used to have some kind of orange flavoured muesli and carob bars, I think, too. Actually I remember quite liking them

My mum used to do me cheese and marmite sandwich every day. Often wrapped in the plastic bread wrapper . With a packet of crisps and a drink

Then she worked in a bakery and I got triangle sandwiches in the plastic sandwich containers. I felt bet posh

Crab paste sandwiches every single day 🤢. That was it, no fruit, no snacks.

Ham or cheese sandwich.
Packet of crisps.
Piece of fruit (that never got eaten)
A drink which might be a bottle of panda pop, um bongo, capri sun or thise little plastic cups of juice that you stuck a straw into.

I never had a lunch box, just an old ice cream tub.

We hardly ever had packed lunches, we went home for lunch until my mum went back to work and then it was school dinners.

My dad used to make mine up to when I left school because I was lazy. It usually consisted with either ham or chicken tikka (the fresh packet stuff) on that circular milk roll bread.

Once I had skipped lunch and I was walking home with my friends, and I went to whip out my sandwich and he had filled it with a piece of paper that just said 'ham' on it with a smiley face. I think he'd clocked on that i was wasting food 😂