There were three possible lunches on school days: regular lunchbox lunch; rainy day lunch; and lunch at home.

On regular days, I opened my metal lunchbox (blue lid and bottom, silver-gray between) to find a sandwich neatly wrapped in waxed paper, made with stiff, dense, brown whole wheat bread. It might be peanut butter, or pimiento cheese with lettuce, or maybe a ham slice, also with lettuce. There would be an apple or a tangerine or a banana. And there would be a little packet of dessert: candied prunes, dark, sticky, and wrinkled–tasty, but so embarrassing that I’d have to eat them quickly, out of sight. Other kids, whose sandwiches were made with soft, white Wonder Bread and baloney, and whose dessert was chocolate chip cookies from a package, stared at my lunches and were glad not to be me. I am grateful to my mother for insisting on healthful food, but I do wish she had taken the social dimension into account and given me some junk every now and then.

Rainy day lunch was more or less the same but with one wonderful addition: hot soup in the thermos. We got to eat at our desks in the classroom if it was raining. I would unscrew the red plastic top of my thermos bottle and discover inside either tomato soup or cream of mushroom, both Campbell’s, both delicious. The classroom lights glowed in a special way on those dark noons. An unusual quiet prevailed, monitored by the teacher, sitting at her desk, eating her lunch along with us. It was strange and rather thrilling to see that teachers, too, ate lunch.

And sometimes I went home for lunch, a walk or bike ride of five blocks or so. There at the formica table in the kitchen, my sister and I might have creamed chipped beef on toast, or creamed sweetbreads (I knew what they were, though they had that phony name), or melted cheese sandwiches, or an interesting toasted sandwich made with a special implement–I think it might have been called the Toastite. It was a metal clamshell with handles about 18 inches long. You opened the clamshell, put the bread and the filling in there, closed it up, and held it over one of the burners on the stove until the bread got hot and crispy. Whatever happened to the Toastite?

Growing up in a small mining town in California’s Mojave Desert, we didn’t have access to a lot of variety when it came to grocery shopping.  But my mom, in true post-World-War-2 fashion, was an enthusiastic supporter of every new thing that came on the market.  So despite our little store’s limited potential, we kids sampled the best that America could offer in ingenious new foods.

Was it convenient?  It landed in Mom’s shopping cart.  Was it fast?  She was on board.  If Uncle Ben could make rice cook in half the time, that’s what we were having.  Aunt Jemima offered pancake mix that already had all the stuff included; you just added water.  Were Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben married?  It seemed likely.  Was Mrs. Butterworth a distant relative, or a little something-something on the side?  You had to wonder.

Dad didn’t get involved in the kitchen very often (being the outdoor barbecue expert), but he seemed as pleased by these fantastic new time-saving foods as Mom was. As a Marine accustomed to eating Spam, Dad was more than happy to see the green Jello salad with its suspended bits of fruit cocktail, or the orange jello mixed with cottage cheese.  It was colorful, it was fun, it doubled as a dessert, and despite its rather low-rent image now, there was no meal Jello could not brighten.

The novelty of Jiffy-Pop, the ease of mixing up Tang orange drink, outweighed any lack of taste in those years.  No one expected Tang to taste like fresh-squeezed orange juice.  It was more about saving labor.  Who wanted to squeeze a bunch of oranges?

Many of Mom’s favorite products of the 50’s and 60’s later fell out of favor, to be replaced with new trends in cooking (I was glad to see the most frightening thing in the kitchen – the pressure cooker — go to the garage). No more canned strawberries; no more boiling vegetables till they were soggy.   But Mom retained her love of the newest and latest all her life.  She had no less than six Swiffer products in her pantry at last count.  And she passed along her embrace of American ingenuity to her daughters, who now squirt Crystal Light into their water bottles and are always ready for the next new thing.