When I opened the refrigerator at work it hit me. A solid wall of oversized cloth lunch ‘boxes’. Realize I am standing there holding my food in a plastic drug store bag. These lunch ‘boxes’ are the size of luggage! That might be why most women call them lunch bags. No matter what you call them, they are big, three-wide, across all shelves leaving no room for me to squeeze in. We keep hearing that America has gotten fat, more accurately the lunch box has really bulked up. Did the big lunch box make us fat, or did fat Americans need a big lunch box? We will never really know.
Just one day before my plastic bagged lunch was all alone, one lunch with a great prairie of shelving to roam. A little over 12 hours later, I was fighting to fit it into the produce drawer at the bottom of the fridge. It would seem that people with the big box would be eating more. At least more than me. A glance around the noontime table indicates not. In fact many are eating salads, yogurt, cottage cheese and Lean Cuisine. So if my unscientific poll is accurate, the big lunch box is not making us fatter.
Major sports stadiums are installing wider seats to accommodate the more ample backsides of their customers. This leads me to ask whether the problem is not the lunch box, but rather the refrigerator. Has it gotten too small? Cars morphed into SUVs, big hulking parking spot filling machines. Are now creating the preconditions for refrigerator growth? Soon refrigerator manufacturers will introduce ever larger cooling units giving our lunch boxes the strap room they need. Which is really want we need, but don’t know it yet. For now I will squeeze my lunch in there,, failing that, its lunch at 8:00 AM and a noontime snack downstairs at the grill.
At The Mic 