Joshua Dages

Writer

All posts are written by me—a human—with no help from AI. I personally thought about it, made myself chuckle, wrote it down, and edited it… em-dashes, oxford commas and all.

Joshua Dages is a designer, artist, and writer who talks about food incessantly to anyone who accidentally walks by.

The Packed Lunch

Growing up my mom packed our school lunches every day. And when I say packed our lunches, I mean prepared our lunches. She didn’t buy pre-made food and put it in a brown paper sack, she prepped, diced, smeared, and chopped everything… and put it in a brown paper sack. It’s just one more extra effort my mom made that I couldn’t/didn’t appreciate until adulthood.

A common list of my school lunch was:

  • Hand-peeled and cut carrots (I still prefer that over those slimy “baby carrots”)

  • Celery sticks

  • A smushed wad of purple dried fruit in a baggie, which I came to understand were raisins

  • A quarter to buy milk (and if I was feeling like I could get away with it, chocolate milk)

  • Some years, a tuna fish sandwich

  • Other years, a cream cheese sandwich. Yes, that’s cream cheese spread between two slices of wheat bread. Like a bagel, but horrible.

Note: When I say some “years” that’s because I got the same sandwich every day for the whole school year. I don’t know if it was easier for my mom to make the same thing every day or if I just didn’t know I could ask for something different.

Nevertheless, that’s what I got for lunch. Monday through Friday. I didn’t know any better. I just assumed we didn’t have the money for the fancy life of Jell-O pudding cups, bags of Doritos and the apex of playground transaction meals, Lunchables. Those were “rich kid” snacks.

We were common folk. We ate things out of baggies. And not ziploc baggies. Not even generic ziploc baggies. Just those baggies that had a reverse fold on top that I had to figure out like a Kong dog toy, but instead of peanut butter, I got carrots. Except for when the bag had celery sticks with peanut butter on them. Then I felt like a good boy.

Joshua Dages