When I was a child, I didn’t carry a lunchbox. I went home to eat lunch. Our house was just five minutes from school, and my sister and I would run—sometimes skip—down the familiar road to arrive home just in time for our 30-minute break. My father, ever practical, would have already rolled the food into quick, compact rice balls to help us eat fast. I don’t remember what we ate, or if it was tasty. The food was consumed, and we returned to class. That was it.
Later, when we moved to a house that was quite some distance away from school, the midday meal came in a tiffin box—a three-tiered steel carrier with a spoon slotted neatly under the handle. I don’t remember every lunch, but I remember the ones I dreaded: the days my mother packed yogurt rice (Thayir Saadam) and pickle in the bottom deck, rice with lentils and vegetable in the middle, and a dry vegetable curry in the top. If the yogurt leaked, it soaked everything. It was messy. It was unglamorous. I envied the North Indian kids whose tiffins never oozed—they had dry rotis and sabzis that didn’t mix or smell as strongly.
But there was still magic in the ritual. At lunchtime, we would sit in a circle under the shade of the old neem tree, and opening the tiffin box was like opening a treasure chest—you never knew what you’d find. And food was always swapped: a bite of this for a spoon of that, a piece of someone’s roti in exchange for my spicy stir-fried vegetable. In college, the politics of the lunchbox grew sharper. My tiffin—became a source of envy and longing for one of my friends—and controversial in quiet ways. A close Brahmin friend, raised in a strict vegetarian household, would eagerly dig into my lunch when my mother had packed chicken or beef. If her parents had known, it would’ve been scandalous. In today’s India—especially under BJP rule in parts of the North—it might even be blasphemous.
The lunchbox, I’ve realized, is not just a container. It’s a geography. What it holds reflects migration, caste, religion, gender, memory—and power. It tells stories about what travels easily and what doesn’t. About whose food is acceptable, and whose is “leaky” or suspect. About the invisible lines we draw between ourselves and others, and how food can quietly cross them.
Years later, in North America, I found myself packing lunchboxes again—this time for my own children. But the container had changed. Now it was a silicone bento-style box with clearly defined compartments: one long rectangle for a sandwich, two smaller squares for “sides,” maybe a round for fruit or yogurt. I stared at it one morning and realized it wasn’t just a box. It was a template. A model for what a “normal” meal looks like in the American imagination—neat, portioned, odorless, dry.
My food culture didn’t fit that box. Not easily, anyway. Rice and curry don’t stay put. Mulligatawny or Rasam, as we call it, isn’t meant to be contained. Pickles bleed. And slowly, without our ever saying it aloud, rice stopped going to school. My kids never asked for it. They never insisted on idlis or lemon rice or uppuma. I wondered—were they embarrassed? Did they not want to stand out? And I understand. When you’re young, negotiating your place in a classroom where your skin or your name already marks you as different, maybe you don’t want your food to do the same. Maybe you want your lunch to be invisible—to blend in with everyone else’s ham and cheese sandwich, Goldfish crackers, and apple slices. Not because you’ve stopped loving what’s from home, but because you’ve learned what stands out. And what gets quietly judged.
That too is part of the geography of a lunchbox. It maps the distance between who we are and where we live. Between what we carry and what we’re allowed to show.
Now I have three tiffin carriers from my childhood sitting on a display shelf in my kitchen. They are relics—memorabilia of care received. Cultural repositories of tastes and textures: leaked yogurt, forbidden meats, quiet negotiations, and shifting boundaries drawn and redrawn through food.
These days, I keep them more for memory than for use. But as I pack lunches in silicone containers designed for sandwiches and sides, I sometimes wonder what my children will carry forward—not just what they ate, but what they were afraid to bring. Whether they’ll remember the warmth of rasam or the awkwardness of standing out. Whether, someday, they’ll open their own version of a lunchbox and find something unexpected there: a reminder of home, and of the quiet ways we carry love through food.
Sunita George is a Professor of Community and Economic Development at the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs at Western Illinois University.
The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the university or Tri States Public Radio.
Diverse viewpoints are welcomed and encouraged.