When I was in elementary school in San Diego, most kids had metal lunch boxes with a Thermos and their lunch. This was mine, from the The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok TV show, which went off the air before I was born, and which I had (and still have) never seen. Typically, the lunches comprised a sandwich, a bag of chips, and often a cookie or even a Hostess snack for dessert. The sandwiches could be anything, but were often bologna (my usual), egg salad, tuna salad, or lunchmeat. The lunch boxes were kept in a cupboard at the back of the classroom, where they sat until lunchtime. As far as I know, none of us ever got sick from eating perishable food that had been in a not-particularly-cool cupboard for four hours.
Today, safe food handling has more emphasis. Labels are required on meats and such, prepared perishable foods, etc. Empirically, it seems like four hours is not too long to store perishable lunches outside of a refrigerator in a Mediterranean climate. But really, how long is safe?
Good question. I researched Illinois laws covering lunches brought from home, and they are extensive.
Key Aspects of Illinois School Lunch Policies
School Authority & Bans: Schools can implement policies that limit or prohibit lunches from home, a power often used for student safety, such as banning peanut butter, or to enforce nutritional guidelines.
Case Study (Chicago): Specific instances, such as at Chicago’s Little Village Academy, have involved policies where students are not allowed to bring lunch from home and must eat the provided school lunch, unless they have a medical exemption.
Allergy and Safety Policies: Schools frequently use their regulatory authority to ban specific allergens (like nuts) or, in some cases, all outside food to ensure a safe environment.
Daycare/Preschool Specifics: For daycares and preschools, caregivers can allow meals from home if there is a written agreement. Food must be labeled with the child’s name, date, and type of food, and it cannot be shared with other children.
Nutritional Standards: While official nutrition standards (like the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act) primarily apply to food sold or served by the school, schools may set their own rules for home-packed lunches.
Food Sharing: Schools often have strict rules against sharing packed food to minimize allergen risks and enforce healthy eating policies.
Tens, nay hundreds of thousands (OK more like tens of millions) of children have brought their school lunches to school and kept them at room temperature in their lockers for a few hours before eating them. I am one of them. So are most (American) Dopers. It’s been going on since universal public education became a thing in this country, and it will continue to go on for the forseeable future.
Still, reports of schoolchildren being sickened by their own lunches, that they brought from home, are rare to nonexistent.
Sometimes people just need to lighten up. I remember being in Paris c. 1986 and eating at a restaurant (not a 3-star Parisian, destination restaurant, but just a … restaurant) and there was a cat walking around, getting pets from the patrons. No one cared. But in the US the Health Department would have that place shut down before closing hours.
Regarding allergy risks: forgive my Gen-X way of thinking about this, but if Malcolm has a peanut allergy, he’ll know quite well by third grade not to eat half of Dewey’s peanut butter sammich. We don’t need to prevent Malcolm from brining peanut butter sammiches to school because of it.
I’m an Xer, had a camper with a peanut allergy when I worked at a summer camp close to 40 years ago. After camp he was at a birthday party, ate a cupcake that unknowingly had peanuts, and died.
I won’t bore you with trials and tribulations of my school lunch problems, as a diabetic child. And the fact my Daddy was military so I went to numerous schools(Somewhere along the line I think I missed 3rd grade completely).
Explanations to school authority was always a big hairy deal.
One school would not let me near the cafeteria. As if a hostess cupcake in the vicinity would kill me. I had to eat my brown bag lunch in the nurses office.
Heck I kinda liked it. I saw lots of stuff go down that I found interesting and didn’t have to deal with making polite lunch table conversation (yay!).
My snacks were kept in the nurses fridge. I took a bunch of guff from kids if I ate snacks and they didn’t have them. So it was better to not be seen.
God, I was such a headache of a kid!
Good thing I was adorable
PS…my lunch was in the fridge so no belly-ache. I would have used that excuse had I known.
I think to some extent , that depends on what the lunch is - peanut butter is probably safe for a few hours as are most of the cold cuts and cheeses that might be in a kid’s sandwich. But I always packed a cooler pack with my kids lunches , because I could. Not sure if they had them when I was young.
Damn good question, and impossible to answer. When I was growing up in Dallas in the 1950s, we didn’t have air conditioning, and butter would melt if we left it on the counter. Milk went sour, and nuts would go rancid. The solution for school lunches was to literally put them in the freezer the night before.
My wife, who grew up on the Great Lakes, laughs at my insistence on putting everything right back in the refrigerator immediately after I use it. But once you’ve had salmonella, you’ll keep food cold.
I grew up in a place where we had temperatures in the 90s and 100s more or less year round. Some kind of “potted meat” sandwich was extremely popular as a school lunch. No refrigeration, no cooling packs. Never heard of anyone getting food poisoning, but food poisoning was ridiculously common, because clean water was not generally available.
