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Don’t get me wrong, we love a good strut down the runway. Along with beautiful customized outfits by the best designers, we also get the joy of seeing the numerous creative accessories that accompany a model: the glasses, the hats, the jewelry, and the purses that add the finishing touches. Even in our personal lives, you may enjoy a stylish bookbag, purse, tote bag, over-the-shoulder bag, or fanny pack. But before we needed handbags we wanted lunch boxes, and as the bells would sound for lunch we would “strut” down the hallways with a new edition lunch box ready to set the tone. So in today’s article, we will unpack the deliciously nostalgic history of lunchtime and the lunchboxes that just so happened to make those memories at the lunch table all the better in elementary.

The origins of the lunchbox is a one of surprising beginnings. It began in the late 19th century around the era of the Second Industrial Revolution. Many men, women, and children were known to use tins and other containers they could find, such as cigarette tins, to carry their food more efficiently while they were on the go. You would oftentimes find more men than women creating these makeshift boxes- as they were often depicted taking them to work before they left the house- whereas women weren’t in the workforce as commonly.

School-aged children were known to also copy after this resourceful solution when they went to school, creating a stronger demand for these lunchboxes. But it wouldn’t be until the 1920’s when the nostalgic lunchbox would be genuinely produced, advertised, and eventually presented to the world.

Continuing into the early to mid stretches of the 20th century, the demand for lunch boxes made for blue collar men and school children would be on the gradual rise in communities and this would create a new business opportunity in the economy. This is when the Thermos Bottling Company would take the chance to profit on this new consumer demand and they would begin to offset manufacturing of the newfound King Seeley Thermos lunch boxes in 1920.

Soon enough lunch boxes would come into high demand during the 1930’s despite the Great Depression and its devastating impact on the stock and jobs market available to U.S citizens at the time. This period would be when we would begin to see many of the lunchboxes you remember in your childhood being manufactured that ultimately created the nostalgic aesthetics within a lunchroom.

These lunch boxes would prove to continue to make a huge impact on the individuals that existed in the midst of the mid to late 20th century. One man, named Steve Harris, would be one individual who would go on to continue collecting these vintage lunch boxes years later and recreate the nostalgia felt in the lunchroom. Stemming from the original Popeye lunch box that his mother originally gave him, Steve Harris would be inspired to go on to collect a valuable amount of these nostalgic lunch boxes in a span of over ten years of his life from the day.

“They're like time capsules. They're the pop culture of the time.”

-Steve Harris, FOX29 News

He boasts walls of numerous lunch boxes ranging from limited edition to the less collectible ones that many tend to shy away from in the collector business. But out of the 240 lunch boxes he has managed to collect already, he has the ability to say that he has more than over half the amount of manufactured lunch boxes that exist out of 437 altogether.

So as time passes and the age of these lunch boxes exceeds juvenile existence, we are reminded of the original runway: The Lunchroom. Not only was it a place to showcase those new Puma jumpsuits or new balances, but those new and limited edition lunch boxes as well. Before pop culture ever became about new designer purses or bags, we pride ourselves on our runway with our favorite lunchbox before our favorite purse.

Smithsonian magazine https://foxsanantonio.com/news/local/tbt-