When I was in elementary school we all brought our lunches to school in lunch boxes. (I can’t remember anyone bringing his lunch in a paper bag.) Typically a kid’s lunch would have a Thermos of milk, a bag of chips, maybe a piece of fruit (apple, banana, or orange), maybe a dessert… and a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper or (in my case) a Baggie (with the Fold-Lock Top™). The lunch boxes were stowed in a cupboard in the back of the classroom, unrefrigerated, in an un-air conditioned classroom in San Diego. My sandwich was usually bologna with Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread. Other kids might have the same with mayo, or a tuna salad, egg salad, or chicken salad sandwich. (Or a PBJ, but that’s not relevant to the question.) Nowadays we’re all conscious of food safety. Back then, perishable foods were kept at room temperature for four hours before being consumed.
Yeah, I hesitated mentioning the MW for that reason. And I’ve heard the same about commercially-made mayonnaise. Perhaps my question is more along the lines of ‘If our unrefrigerated lunches didn’t make us sick, then why are we so concerned about it today?’
FWIW, bologna sandwiches taste better at room temperature. (Though nowadays, on the rare occasions I have one, I use mayonnaise.)
I’m pretty sure mayo-based salads (macaroni, potato, 7-layer) still make day-long appearances un-refridgerated at plenty of outdoor parties and no one really worries about it.
I’m no longer in elementary school, so I can’t answer that. But when I see someone carrying a lunch box it’s always a soft, insulated one. And the SO puts an ice pack in hers.
How do we know we didn’t get sick? I remember kids barfing all the time.
It could also be that everything we ate “back in the day” was so overly processed that bacteria couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Nowadays more and more people have gotten on the organic foods train and that means fewer preservatives.
Parenting styles are a little different now, too. The babies must be protected at all costs.
The high oil content in mayonaisse effectively blocks out air stopping bacterial growth. Food poisoning associated with mayo products is actually due to bacterial growth in the other contents. The chicken in your chicken salad is the problem, not the mayo. For school lunches, if the contents were properly kept before hand, the 3-4 hours storage in a lunch box or paper bag wouldn’t be sufficient for substantial bacterial growth.
Likewise, you can take food with you on a picnic without poisoning yourself. It takes a while for bacterial growth to be a problem. Usually, it’s not difficult to tell if food has gone off. If it smells bad, it is bad.
My mother always used Miracle Whip or mustard on our sandwiches because she was afraid mayo would spoil. And our metal lunchboxes came with thermoses (although we usually didn’t use them because we could get milk at school). Everything else was fairly non-perishable…small cans of pudding or fruit, carrot sticks, apples, oranges, chips, cookies. Nothing that would go bad in a few hours. There are no microwaves for students at school, so no reason to pack things like leftovers that would be reheated.
My father had an outside job, and he carried his lunch in a small cooler with an ice pack. We might have, too, if they had made coolers small enough for the average school locker back then. Mom was a home economics major in college, and I get the impression she was more aware of/concerned with food safety than many others of her generation.
Heck, I don’t refrigerate my lunch today and it doesn’t make me sick. I suspect people underestimate how long something needs to be out of the fridge to be dangerous.
This is a fun thing that people like to believe that isn’t actually borne out by reality, at least in my experience.
I think mayonnaise is gross so we don’t keep it in the house, but apart from that, my kids go to school with lunches consisting of everything mentioned in the OP. Lunch meat, fruit, tuna salad, whatever. It’s not a big deal. They have the soft-side lunch boxes because that’s the only kind you can find these days but they aren’t specially insulated or whatever. From what I’ve seen at the elementary school on days I volunteer there, the same is true of most of the other kids. Nobody is rocking up to the lunch room with a cooler full of ice or whatever.
I mean, I’m sure there are germophobes out there who won’t let their kids pack lunchmeat sandwiches without a giant ice pack in their lunchbox or whatever. But I had a co-worker once who wouldn’t answer the phone without first wiping down the handset with an antibacterial wipe, and that certainly doesn’t mean that everyone in America is terrified of phone germs or whatever.
Edit: Before anyone asks, why yes, yes I was getting paid a dollar for every time I used the word “whatever” in this post. (Or whatever.)
My typical lunch as a kid was a tuna sandwich with mayo, a piece of fruit, and cookies (you bought milk at school). The sandwich and cookies were wrapped in foil, wax paper, or plastic – plastic bags hadn’t been invented…
If the tuna was made the night before, it had just reached room temperature by lunch. Even if it was made up from scratch in the morning, it didn’t have much time for bacteria to grow (especially since it came from a can, where the bacteria were killed in the canning process). The mayo was a preservative (the acid in the vinegar is a bad environment for germs).
I can’t seem to find a straight answer on how long a sandwich made of refrigerated cold cuts could be expected to last, but the four or so hours before lunch is not an issue unless it were kept on a radiator or in the sun. Even then, it may be perfectly fine; food science is always overly cautious about the actual danger.
Packed Lunches are safer with the ice pack in it. I had the traditional metal lunchbox & thermos in elementary school. I usually broke the glass liner within the first month of school and didn’t have a thermos until the next school year. Peanut butter and banana was my favorite school lunch then. Fluffernutters were another favorite school sandwich. I don’t recall many lunch-meat sandwiches back then.
I started carry a vinyl bag with ice pack in high school. Ham sandwiches and roast beef were common in my lunch by then. Mostly because I was older and out grown peanut butter for lunch every day.
I still enjoy a good pb & banana sandwich now and then. A great way to use up bananas when they turn dark.