Lunchables

This seems like a good time to remind you that I’m twenty eight years old.

Which is why I need two lunchables. And probably a third, really. Looking at them now, it’s remarkable that one ever felt like enough. Three crackers with marinara and a couple strips of cheese is somehow a meal? But Lunchables were always more about the novelty, anyway.

Growing up, my loving mother would send me to school with a PBJ on wheat bread, a sippy bottle of skim milk, and apple slices every weekday for, oh, twelve years. I ate so many PBJs that they became less of a food and more of a prescription that the school bell reminded me to take at the same time each day. Except during field trips. The night before, say, a trip to the museum, ten-year-old me would take my mom through the facts of the matter and lead her to the only conclusion that made sense – that a PBJ just wouldn’t do. And my mother, surely fed up with her son being of that ungrateful age when simple, selfless acts of love do nothing but increase the want of the easy and impersonal, would usually “agree”.

Then came the hard part. And it was simpler back then. Now the Lunchables section at Safeway takes up half an aisle and you can get everything from Italian sandwiches to “Asian Style BBQ Chicken Nuggets”, but there are still really only two options. Crackers with meat and cheese, or pepperoni pizza. There’s an argument to be made for the nachos, but it’s a bad one and you’re wrong if you make it. And, let’s just get to it, you’re wrong if you pick anything but pepperoni pizza. The cracker stackers are a classic, every child’s introduction to what they’ll eventually call charcuterie, but the cheese is elastic and, you come to realize, tastes like no other cheese you’ll ever have, and the meat looks pre-translucent and tastes like hot dog water. Especially after four hours in a brown paper bag. Pepperoni holds up better outside of the fridge and, even if the cheese succumbs to the same rubbery fate, the pizza sauce is distracting enough to cover for any textural shortcomings. Because really, that pizza sauce is the foundation upon which the Lunchables empire is built. The only successful marinara made to be served cold or at room temp. But as good as it is, it can’t elevate a flavorless “crust” and a sprinkling of cheese above any actual cooked pizza, so then why, as a twenty eight year old man, am I choosing to eat two Lunchables tonight?

Because camping. Which, I realize, isn’t a great reason. If anything it’s an anti-reason. People get excited to go camping solely for the prospect of being able to cook over an open flame without the neighbors asking pesky questions about why you decided to have a bonfire in your backyard. And on top of that, what else are you supposed to do while camping besides spend twenty minutes burning a hot dog? So I know I’m in the wrong. But at this point my body is trained to expect cracker pizzas whenever I’m within spitting distance of more than two pine trees. A novelty turned habit that I feel no need to break. All my camping trips are more functional than recreational, anyway. Time is the limiting resource and it’s a matter of allocation between food, dig time, and sleep – and really only two of those are variable.

So, Lunchables it is. And that’s fine! Lunchables exist within a judgement-free, shared nostalgia for people my (or maybe any) age, I like to think that anyone who sees me buy one isn’t thinking “that’s for a child”, but rather “that’s for the child in you”.

Or maybe they judge me.