# Dabbawalas \[Indian lunch delivery\]- how do they do it? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 28, 2014, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555 "2014-02-28T23:15:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2014, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/61 "2014-03-03T23:15:37Z")
I remember the dhobi arriving with the washed clothes and counting them out—he used Hindi for numbers and English for types of clothing—“Char andarweeahr, tin andarshart, do pent, ek shart” ---
**Author:** ![wolfman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/a8b319/32.png) [@wolfman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfman)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2014, 11:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/62 "2014-03-03T23:21:43Z")
I have always thought that it is a cool system, and kinda wish it was available here too. Then I remember I would have to pay someone to go to my house to make the meal, so it could be delivered, which would be really ass-backward.:smack: ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2014, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/63 "2014-03-03T23:35:32Z")
Maybe we should start a thread about odd tallying methods. I remember a hamburger stand in North Hollywood that used a Ma Jong board with tiles to keep track of the orders – nothing was written in letters or numbers. I could never figure out the code, but it was much more efficient than modern fast food restaurants using computerized displays. I think it relies, much like an abacus or soroban, on a lot of mental arithmetic or memorization, which, once learned, makes up for the crude notation system. I certainly can’t see putting a green MacDonald’s employee through a grueling 3 week course to learn a system like this. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2014, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/64 "2014-03-04T00:29:45Z")
I think the key is that they hire people who have lived on the streets of Bombay for years and have never been able to afford to ride in a car or taxi. You wouldn’t have to do much training to teach them the system. Remember, this is India. Cheap, unskilled labor is easy to find. ---
**Author:** ![bldysabba](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ecccb3/32.png) [@bldysabba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bldysabba)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2014, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/65 "2014-03-04T01:16:29Z")
I would caution people to take Acsenray’s disclaimer seriously, and commend him for putting it in. I would consider his comments _very_ accurate if applied to India up to the 1990’s, less so now. (Half of India’s population is below 25). They certainly explain part of why an institution like the dabbawallahs would come up, although RNATB’s comments on the very peculiar structure of Bombay should be considered. It’s an idiosyncratic, incredibly densely packed city that has evolved almost along a straight line around it’s railway tracks and it has a number of institutions that are unique to it. Musicat asked why people don’t just carry the tiffin themselves. Try commuting in a Bombay local train at peak hour and then ask. Besides which, I’m sure it is more convenient for whomever is preparing the lunch to have more time to do it. Something else that is fast changing and that I expect will cut into the phenomenon that are dabbawallas is that women are now increasingly part of the workforce, not labour that can stay at home and send you a lunchbox. As for cold cuts - I grew up vegetarian, but I now eat a number of meat products. I will also eat cold cuts if they’re there, but I have _never_ understood the appeal. To me they are bland and yucky. I expect many Indians, who’re used to having spicy, hot(temperature) food would respond similarly. FWIW, I lived in Bombay in the late 90’s but had never heard of the system until some famous foreign tourist (Charles? Bill Gates/Clinton? Someone) was fascinated by it and it made a big splash in the media, and then before you knew it there was talk of six sigma verification for them and all sorts of stuff in the news all the time. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2014, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/66 "2014-03-04T01:25:12Z")
Even Indians born in the late '60s and '70s to middle class families have a very different outlook than their parents. Their world completely changed in the 1990s. Those who never experience life in the '70s don’t even have that bridging experience. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2014, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/67 "2014-03-04T01:42:31Z")
> [@chappachula](#): > > Now, I have another question: in America, there used to be milkmen who delivered milk fresh every day, entering the home where women were alone while their husbands were at work. > And there used to be lots of jokes (and juicy rumors) about illicit romances, etc. > Is there a similar situation in India? > Or what about, say, stories of dabbawalas tasting some of the food they deliver? IIRC, dabawallahs don’t come to your door, just to a place nearby where wives go to drop off their tiffins. ---
**Author:** ![bldysabba](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ecccb3/32.png) [@bldysabba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bldysabba)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2014, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/68 "2014-03-04T01:58:19Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > Even Indians born in the late '60s and '70s to middle class families have a very different outlook than their parents. Their world completely changed in the 1990s. Those who never experience life in the '70s don’t even have that bridging experience. Yeah, 1991 was huge. I was born very early 80’s, and I regard my generation as the last that has a conscious memory of what India was like pre-1990. Even though I was just a kid when it happened, I could see the liberalisation making things better. It worries me, that the lessons of those first 40 years or so may be lost. ---
**Author:** ![EdwardLost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/bbe5ce/32.png) [@EdwardLost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EdwardLost)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2014, 6:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/69 "2014-03-04T06:29:33Z")
I saw a documentary on the dubbawalas on TV some years ago. Memory is hazy, but I believe that each tin would hit two or three stations where tins would be sorted for delivery to the next stop. I remember a scene where guys were sitting under a tree unpacking their boxes of tins and passing them back and forth until they had the correct tins to carry on to the next leg. ---
**Author:** ![KKKK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/48db29/32.png) [@KKKK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KKKK)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2014, 9:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/70 "2014-03-10T09:50:49Z")
> [@Musicat](#): > > So bringing food that same, long distance is better than using a nearby restaurant? The schools have no lunch facilities? And is the only good food hot? No one eats coldcuts, chips, cheese, bread, salads and fruit in India? > > Besides, the tiffins shown in closeup look like they aren’t insulated much anyway. Restaurant food is not the same as home food, and daily eating in restaurants tends to turn out expensive (unless you go to a really cheap place, where quality and hygiene could become issues). People do eat coldcuts and breads in India, but they are not as staple an element of our diet as they are in the US. And coldcuts will spoil in Indian summers. Salads and fruits could well be part of the dabbas, along with the other stuff. So if you have a multi-layer tiffin, layer one could be fruits/salads, layer two could be vegetables, layer three could be rice or rotis to go with the vegetables, layer four could be a sweet dish. ---
**Author:** ![KKKK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/48db29/32.png) [@KKKK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KKKK)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2014, 9:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/71 "2014-03-10T09:53:30Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > Some of the foods you mentioned (coldcuts especially) are not part of the traditional cuisine in India, although Subway and other chains are surprisingly common. Subway, McDonalds, etc. are common. But they are also way more expensive than a home meal – depending on how much you eat, 4-6 times more expensive. ---
**Author:** ![KKKK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/48db29/32.png) [@KKKK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KKKK)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2014, 10:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/72 "2014-03-10T10:01:13Z")
> [@Musicat](#): > > Some are due to values, religion, custom, and if you read my response very carefully, I acknowledged that. I also claimed that some reasons were due to ignorance, and I listed those directly from **Acsenray’s** post. If you believe that refrigerators spoil food and properly handled fruits, veggies, sliced meats and breads are bad for you, you have a beef with the FDA and nutritionists, not me. Sliced meats and breads are not inherently bad for you. But after 4-5 hours in a steel tiffin in temperatures of 100F and humidity touching 90%, they’re likely to turn bad. I carry fruit to the office sometimes (Delhi not Bombay), but only in winter. I tried it in summer, and by lunchtime with temperatures touching 115, much of the fruit was a soggy mess. Don’t judge Indians by Western standards. ---
**Author:** ![KKKK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/48db29/32.png) [@KKKK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KKKK)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2014, 10:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/73 "2014-03-10T10:08:34Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > In addition to the food-based reasons, it’s also a function of [the way Mumbai is laid out.](http://www.mumbainet.com/images/cityinfo/railmap.gif) Because of the shape of the underlying peninsula ([which is not entirely natural](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Seven_Islands_of_Bombay_en.svg)), everything is in sort of a straight line (including the rail line). That means you don’t have to load tiffins onto 50 trains to serve the whole city; you just need one going northeast from Churchgate and one or two going southwest. Contrast this to delivering pizza boxes from 40 Pizza Huts spread across a city. > > My mother used to get tiffin lunches at medical school from my grandmother in Pune. It’s an entirely different city more than 100 miles from central Mumbai. > > Dabawallahs are a unique and magical institution. _Nothing_ else in India is reliable. Nothing else in India is reliable?! Sweeping generalization there! ---
**Author:** ![ThelmaLou](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thelmalou/32/390_2.png) [@ThelmaLou](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThelmaLou)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2014, 11:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/74 "2014-03-10T11:21:44Z")
Thanks for your comments, KKKK. Love to hear that first hand knowledge. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Cartooniverse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cartooniverse/32/3084_2.png) [@Cartooniverse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cartooniverse)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2014, 11:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/75 "2014-03-10T11:40:58Z")
> [@arseNal](#): > > That’s a huge if. Westerners are advised quite strongly to avoid most raw anythings when visiting India. You’d have to be kinda nuts to eat a salad except maybe in an expensive restaurant, from what I recall. This. When the raw produce is picked by a person who stops their job of picking produce, defecates in the field, wipes their bottom with their left hand and then goes back to picking produce, one is well-informed- \*\* not ignorant\*\*- to avoid uncooked produce. This is in no way a slight to the billions of people lacking more modernized sanitation on the planet. It is instead an honest accounting of one of the origins of the layered reasoning that **Ascenray** was good enough to articulate in that wonderful post up there. This is not, of course, a situation unique to the Indian sub-continent. But it is fair to say that the concerns over ingesting uncooked produce are heightened in countries where sanitary conditions in the fields and processing plants are not as refined. The spiritual and " care taken by wife/ mother to cook for me " concerns are entirely new to me. This is a fascinating thread !!! ---
**Author:** ![Cartooniverse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cartooniverse/32/3084_2.png) [@Cartooniverse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cartooniverse)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2014, 11:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/76 "2014-03-10T11:43:58Z")
> [@Musicat](#): > > It looks like quite a bit of training and memorization is needed to interpret that. Maybe it’s like the London cabbies, who learn every street and have a map in their head. Until the advent of GPS, New York City cabbies knew every street in Manhattan as well. When lucky, you’d get one who knew huge parts of the outer boroughs. I wonder if that old chestnut about London cabbies is simply not true any more, because of GPS. ---
**Author:** ![carlb](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carlb/32/5930_2.png) [@carlb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carlb)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2014, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/77 "2014-03-10T11:56:53Z")
> [@Cartooniverse](#): > > Until the advent of GPS, New York City cabbies knew every street in Manhattan as well. When lucky, you’d get one who knew huge parts of the outer boroughs. > > I wonder if that old chestnut about London cabbies is simply not true any more, because of GPS. While I don’t go to London _a lot_, I wind up there every year-and-a-half or so, and my wife goes many times a year. Neither one of us has ever seen a GPS in a black cab (I’m not saying they don’t exist - just that they are not as commonplace as in US cabs). Her last trip, my wife gave the cabbie an address to a location that did not appear to be in a heavily-traveled area. She began to say, “it’s near…” and the cabbie cut her off with a curt, “I know where it is.” As far as we can tell, “The Knowledge” is very much still a thing, and I, for one, am glad that it is. ---
**Author:** ![Martini\_Enfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/martini_enfield/32/11123_2.png) [@Martini\_Enfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martini_Enfield)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2014, 12:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/78 "2014-03-10T12:46:20Z")
> [@carlb](#): > > While I don’t go to London _a lot_, I wind up there every year-and-a-half or so, and my wife goes many times a year. Neither one of us has ever seen a GPS in a black cab (I’m not saying they don’t exist - just that they are not as commonplace as in US cabs). Her last trip, my wife gave the cabbie an address to a location that did not appear to be in a heavily-traveled area. She began to say, “it’s near…” and the cabbie cut her off with a curt, “I know where it is.” As far as we can tell, “The Knowledge” is very much still a thing, and I, for one, am glad that it is. When my wife and I were last in London a couple of years ago, we saw more than one person zipping around The City on a scooter or moped which had a map on a clipboard on the handlebars. Apparently they were studying for The Knowledge, which is definitely still a requirement for a London Black Cab taxi driver’s licence. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2014, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/79 "2014-03-10T14:07:42Z")
> [@KKKK](#): > > Nothing else in India is reliable?! Sweeping generalization there! It was hyperbole, obviously. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2014, 10:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555/80 "2014-03-11T10:39:32Z")
I have no problem wrapping my head around exactly how different India is from the US - I watch enough movies, documentaries and participate in enough online conversations with people both from India and who frequently visit India. Even with a couple hundred years of both Brit and Portugese culture overlain on India it is a very thin veneer. You find the same viewpoint of time and scheduling as something that will happen eventually in many other areas in the world [come soon style frex] and food as a more personal item than we treat it in the US [though I do have a Guyanese Indian acquaintence that will not eat anything not prepared in her home by herself or grudgingly one of her sisters or daughters.] [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dabbawalas-indian-lunch-delivery-how-do-they-do-it/682555.md?page=5)