Don't laugh at Lunchables

by Erich Kuersten, Posted Apr 25th 2006 @ 6:03PM

Last week I went to a reading by author Rick Moody (The Ice Storm, etc.) at Pratt Institute, where this esteemed and controversial author read a food shopping blog wherein he sung the praises of Kraft Food's amazing lunchables in the sort of satirical way that hipsters of his generation praise Showgirls and Niel Diamond. As a food blogger I wasn't smiling, no sir.

Lunchables are an easy target to go after; a miracle of modern packaging and convenience wherein a whole smorgasbord of luncheon goodness is combined in a handy, stay-fresh plastic see-thru carton, each ingredient separated for maximum freshness and so the flavors do not mix. There's an array of flavors and styles out there now, all aimed squarely at kid's lunchboxes.

Curiously, the ads on the Kraft website boast that lunchables allow your kids to "Make fun of lunch!" Is Kraft really so determined to create a generation of Rick Moodys?

On a side note, for our friends who aren't in Canada and don't know why I am so loyal to Kraft it's because in Canada they have a thing called "Kraft Dinner."

Here in the states we call it plain old macaroni and cheese, or if you wish to be blunt, "mac and cheese." There's an array of styles for this lovely treat, and it fits an array of budgets, but only Canada has genericized mac and cheese into "Kraft dinner." Technically, all of Canada should be sued, but for some reason it's just too damned cute. We like Canadians to call mac and cheese Kraft Dinner. It's got a ring to it. In this way, we come to revere Kraft as some sort of diplomatic liason between the U.S.A. and our komrades in the Great White North.

Goddamned Rick Moody and his intellectual dismissivness towards the mighty Kraft lunchables, all insular and Yankee-centric. Of course Pratt alum Daniel Clowes already slyly satirized the lunchables thing in his graphic novella, Ghost World, wherin two cute punk girls in some hellish suburb follow a Satanist couple grocery shopping and notice that in their cart are about 50 lunchables packs. Now I've not read enough Rick Moody to judge him one way or the other but I've read damn near all of Clowes and can testify the man's a friggin genius. He merely illustrates in a single panel the cart with the lunchables in it and that "wraps" the grocery store scene; no labored explanation, no nothing. Now, I didn't stick around for the end of Moody's lunchables saga; I left in a huff. But he didn't linger on the lunchables, from there he quickly moved down his shopping list, waxing on and off about the proper pronunciation of "bologna" and the strange miracle that is olive loaf and so forth. From there, he moved onto other aisles, and the lunchables debate was forgotten.

Well, it was forgotten for him.

For some of us, the lunchables issue goes on and on.

If you grew up with a mom packing you lunches of bologna sandwiches and putting a handful of chips in a little sandwich bag as I did, then you probably find yourself drawn to the lunchables when you see them in the store. There's something just so wrong about them. They seem to imply that deep down, we just want capitalism to just stop pretending to show restraint. We want to have our pre-packaged packaging packaged. We want every last little vestige of organic material removed from our foodstuffs, until all that remains is a memory of mom and Saturday morning TV cartoons.

Can you imagine what a grocer shopping experience might be like if the lunchables idea caught on to other meals? We already have a similar sort of thing with the yogurts that come with the little saucer of granola or grape nuts on the top of them. Those are cool, but personally I find them a little too smug, to sure of themselves. They'd scoff at lunchables as being too middle states, too caught up in the SUV mythos. The lunchables are meant for road trips and picnics and other American things, the granola-yogurt is meant for eating in the gym lounge, while waiting for your mud bath or kick boxing class to start. No thank you! My ideal breakfast lunchable would involve about 5 ounces of milk in a square carton connected by their shared plastic top to a square bowl shaped container, half full of cereal. In another square section would be a tiny little blueberry muffin, and in the last container, a single grape.

Of course you get this same sort of stuff on airplanes, but it's torture to have to sit there, trapped in your seat watching as the stewardesses slowly make their way down the aisle towards you. Then when they get to you and you try to speak you realize the dry air and the loud humming has made your voice strange and far away. And who wants to travel somewhere outside our golden U.S. just to eat lunchables? They're right in the grocery store. In fact they're a whole grocery store right inside a box. So don't let the snobs fool you, lunchables do indeed rock, in that Kid Rock sort of way we all secretly love.

Filed Under: Cooking With Kids, Pop Food
Tags: bagged lunch, feature, lunch, lunchables, mom, pop food, retro, school, snack

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

4-25-2006 @6:16PM jon said... Hmmmm....isn't Kraft part of Phillip Morris, death merchants? Personally, we do our best around here not to buy their products. It's not just because PM makes and sells cigarettes. It is because they are aggressively marketing to women and teens all over the world and are implicated in money laundering and smuggling. It's fine to enjoy their mac 'n' cheese, as long as you are mindful of who they are. If you are really mindful, maybe the food won't taste so good...
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4-25-2006 @7:58PM peggy said... It's so easy to make great mac 'n cheese -- who needs Kraft? But if you must, for a good packaged Mac n' Cheese, Try Annie's Naturals. The white cheddar is delicious and it's a bit better fer 'ya and the kiddies than Kraft stuff. Luncheables? I make my own lunch, too, and always made my daughter's lunch when she was in school. It's just not all that hard to do!
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4-25-2006 @8:37PM Betty said... Erich, I couldn't tell if you were praising or bashing Lunchables, each paragraph seemed to veer the opposite way of the other.
Lunchables: sure they're 'cool'. They're convenient, all in one. Flip over the cool package and take a look at the fat, calories, sodium and the JUNK they cram in those little cool shapes of ham, cheese, turkey, etc jus to preserve them in their cool little packaging. Any wonder we have a growing ADD/ADHD epidemic with the growing convenience craze and prepackaged-preservative-crammed-too-lazy-to-fix-a-real-snack thing we have going on. But HEY! We're getting lazier, fatter, so are our kids, so if you're too lazy to break out your own bread, crackers, juice, etc.....buy the Lunchables!!!
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4-25-2006 @10:40PM Sarah said... In my Nutrition Action newsletter, Lunchables are listed as one of the top 10 foods NOT to eat. They are extremely high in sodium, fat, and preservatives. So, yes, they may be "fun," in a nostalgic sort of way, but we've learned a lot since "way back when" we were kids eating bologna sandwiches on Wonder bread with mayo. Let's not support a product that has virtually no nutritional value, and, because of its marketing and advertising, is bought by many undereducated parents for their chidlren. Sorry, I just can't buy into the nostalgic feeling. I have to be a fuddy-duddy grown-up on this one, and say that progress is a good thing. Let's learn from nutritional developments.
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4-26-2006 @12:45AM Adam said... I'm not sure that disliking overprocessed, preservative-filled, plastic-wrapped crap makes me a snob. I guess I just don't want my kids (when I have them) to grow up thinking that that's what food is supposed to look and feel and taste like. Once in a while, it's not going to kill you, but why torture yourself? It's soylent pink with crackers, for Pete's sake.

The more frightening point is what #3 brought up -- that parents might think it's okay to feed their kids this garbage on a regular basis. I don't imagine that people are maliciously feeding their children Lunchables out of a conscious desire to hurt them and fill them with chemicals. But if we think about the family that has lunchables for lunch -- do you think that kid's going to be having fresh salmon and organic wild rice for supper? Probably not.

When looked at as a part of a larger trend, we have a generation of seriously misnourished (as in, mistaking flavoring and coloring for "food", and having lots of chemicals in their little bodies) kids and a generation of parents who think that the quality of the food you put in your body is an afterthought.
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4-26-2006 @5:17AM rue said... WTF was he talking about? Did he have a point or was he just rambling about some guys book and mac and cheese? Dude you are NOT a writer not even a little.
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4-26-2006 @7:23AM Jonathan Harford said... Great entry.
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4-26-2006 @9:17AM ty said... My head hurt trying to read that. Did it have a point?

I was making my own lunches from grade 5 on. Its not that hard. And, they were much healtheir than this crap or the reconstituted stuff they serve in school cafes.
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4-26-2006 @9:34AM Erich Kuersten said... Whoa, what a storm of controversy. I was trying to be ironic, Rue, POST-IRONIC, in fact. I was trying to prompt a discussion that American nostalgia is, in itself, a corporate conspiracy. McDonald's, for example, concentrates their billion dollar marketing at kids, with the result that when we've grown up we find we've been conditioned to associate their toxic "food" with our childhoods. We were raised on poison, and now we pine for toxins. Still, no need to spew venom. And Dude, if you're gonna accuse me of not being a writer, you should do so using correct punctuation. Oh, Snap.
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