WFI picture editor Lisa Anders scoured the globe to find photographers to record the food that schoolchildren around the world take for lunch. Words by Mark Porter.
They come in all colours, shapes and sizes. Their backgrounds are as distinctive as their geography is diverse, but one thing they have in common, as they are rushed out of the house for school, is that they are all very different. The other common factor is that mums, house maids and au pairs - the world over - do their best to turn them out neat and tidy every morning. But by the time they get to the school gates, it is a different story.
You may think I mean children; I don't. I'm writing about lunch boxes. This humble container is found in every corner of the globe, and its contents reflect the huge culinary diversity that we enjoy. In Britain, for example, there are now more children eating packed lunches than suffering the cabbage-infused abominations of the traditional school canteen.
We have sampled the goodies from eight countries, spoken to the children and parents, and can reasonably conclude that the packed lunch has undergone an explosion in popularity. Azola, from Cape Town, likes curried mince and savoury doughnuts; Kazutaka from Japan wolfs down lotus root and salads (while dreaming of hamburgers), while David from Glasgow tucks in to a turkey 'piece'. The delicacies of the packed lunch in New Delhi are a far cry from the peanut butter of Brooklyn, each box thus providing a glimpse into the culture from which it emerges.
The British spend around £2.2 billion on packed lunches each year, as more adults and children opt for them: and in the past two years, the number of people eating them has gone up by is nine per cent. But, while they provide a cheaper option to the ready-made meal, packed lunch is predominantly a middle-class phenomenon.
A report by research group Taylor Nelson Sofres suggests that 13 million families take food from home to work or school at least three times a week. Eight out of ten homes with children make packed lunches. They also appeal to young professionals: almost as many 25 to 34-year-olds take lunch to work. Old habits die hard.
There have periodically been health scares about keeping food in a plastic container during the heat of the day, but these have been solved by a Japanese company: Marutake Sangyo coats lunch-box lids with an extract of Japanese horseradish (wasabi) - a man-made alternative to plutonium. This prevents mould growth, even if it does blow the top of your head off.
But the lunch-box container has been around for a while. In the us, collecting ancient examples has become a popular and lucrative hobby. A recent headline in the Wall Street Journal proclaimed: "Forget Stocks; invest in Old Lunch Boxes."
The first specially manufactured boxes were made in 1902, and were shaped like picnic baskets. It was not until the mid-Thirties that their popularity began to see a dramatic increase, with Disney characters such as Snow White and Mickey Mouse adorning them.
In 1949, Aladdin Industries of Chicago slapped Hopalong Cassidy, a tv cowboy, on their products. Hopalong did so well others were forced to follow suit. The 1953 steel box, complete with lithograph of that other tv cowboy, Roy Rogers, sold 2.5 million, and between 1950 and 1970, 120 million lunch boxes, featuring just about every screen and film icon, were sold in the us.
Then, in the mid-Seventies, spoilsport legislators in Florida outlawed metal lunch boxes because they were being used as weapons to bash teachers and class rivals. As such, the lunch box was precursor to the gun in the playgrounds of America, but these sociological implications have, by and large, gone unnoticed.
All of which sounds a million miles away from the Bala Vidya Mandir (Temple of Children's Education) in Madras, where eight- to 11-year-old, middle-class children have eaten from tiffin boxes full of rice or rotis with fresh vegetable dishes, lightly spiced eggs and other delicacies since the days of the Raj.
In Japan, children eat in their classrooms after saying itadakimasu (I shall partake), the Japanese equivalent of grace. Lunch boxes there are not allowed in some schools because, as well as the time and cost involved in their preparation, they have led to competition between children and parents to produce the most elaborate feast. It has also been noticed that fried chicken and chips have been replacing the traditional and healthier grilled fish and crisp vegetables.
Meanwhile in Britain, we are seeing this trend being reversed. There has been a marked move away from spam sandwiches and Wagon Wheel biscuits. Parents are now opting for pâté, spicy sausage, exotic foreign foods and bagels. Among the favourite new items are tuna and potato salad, pasta salads, chicken satay, mixed fruits and other delicious morsels unheard of in the days of boiled cabbage prepared by cooks who looked like John Wayne in drag.