A 1950s Superman box. Filling kids’ lunchboxes still ranks at the top of back-to-school chores.

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON When her daughter was 15 months old, Kim Becker began packing the girl’s lunch to take to a group playdate. Becker was following the popular cookbook Super Baby Food, whose recipes are as liberal with wheat germ as Paula Deen’s are with butter. So one day, Becker baked Alexa and her playmate a treat of muffins secretly fortified with flaxseed and brewer’s yeast, figuring Alexa wouldn’t notice.

The toddlers excitedly tore into the dense cake and choked down the first bite. Then they put the muffins on the ground and ran away.

Great, Becker thought, I’ve got 22 left.

Packing a child’s lunch is truly a labor of love. It also involves guilt and anxiety. The container alone provokes all types of questions: Is it made of vinyl? Does the vinyl have lead? Will hot food stay hot? Will cold food stay cold? Will the world end sooner because I used a sandwich bag instead of a reusable tub?

Add to these the usual trials of lunch packing — a child’s mercurial tastes, other parents who cut their kids’ sandwiches like topiaries, the ever-present temptation of junk food — and you’ve got a microcosm of parental angst in a 10-by-7-inch box with a handle.

Packing lunch is “the bane of every parent’s existence,” said Becker, who now lives in Connecticut. “Funny how something so simple can be so complicated.”

The packed lunch began modestly enough: a sandwich in a dome-lidded steel box carried by factory workers. The golden age of the lunchbox as pop culture time capsule and movie tie-in didn’t begin until the early 1950s, when Thermos came out with a Hopalong Cassidy box.

The lunchbox became a childhood totem. “It is one of the earliest points when children get to choose something for themselves. It’s an early test of consumerism,” said David Shayt, a curator with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Lunchbox makers encouraged obsolescence by switching to thinner, more easily dented gauges of steel and rolling out new models each fall the way automakers did with cars.

Today’s lunchboxes are too sterile for Shayt. “The mushy soft packs lack some of the 20th-century rigidity and John Wayne swagger,” he said. “They look like a fanny pack or something you stick a Nutri-Grain bar in, not a bologna sandwich.”

But lunchbox makers know what they’re doing. They’re tapping into our avian-flu-freaked, mad-cow-manic, global-warming-worried zeitgeist.

Fear crept gradually into lunchbox design. Thermos boxes came with insulated containers. By the 1980s, rust-prone metal was replaced with easier-to-clean plastic. The plastic boxes, however, weren’t good at keeping food at safe temperatures to reduce the risk of bacterial growth. So in the ’90s, plastic gave way to fabric or vinyl stuffed with insulating foam.

Environmentalists have raised concerns recently about the health effects of chemicals used to make vinyl and plastics. Now there are high-tech water bottles with descriptions straight out of a laboratory-supply catalog. Many lunchboxes are PVC-free, meaning that they are not made with polyvinyl chloride, which can contain lead. A popular alternative to vinyl is neoprene, the material used to make diving suits. Another is FDA-approved food-grade PEVA, a non-chlorinated vinyl.

The biggest challenge, however, has little to do with such externalities. Consciously or not, many parents compare themselves with some unattainable ideal.

Whatever you pack, being judged (by yourself and others) is inevitable. The crumbs in the Tupperware container say it all. You know instantly whether meatloaf dumplings were a success or a bust. And everybody else at your kid’s lunch table does, too.

The latest hot solution is the bento box. The art of the bento as perfected in Japan is a takeout or homemade meal made up of single servings of rice, fish and vegetables, packed tightly into a washable container. Japanese parents have been known to spend hours artfully arranging their children’s bento box meals, and the containers themselves can be quite elaborate.

Americans have embraced ersatz bentos, most notably in the form of Lunchables, those packaged meals of crackers, cheese and other processed foods sold by Kraft Foods. Inspired by bento boxes, Lunchables have remained huge sellers for 20 years, owning nearly 80 percent of the $750-million packaged kids’-meal market, according to market research firm Packaged Facts.

But for Deborah Hamilton of San Francisco, sending her son to school with Lunchables is the ultimate defeat. Hamilton has tried to reclaim bento as a healthful solution to the lunch-packing conundrum. With her blog, Lunch in a Box ( www.lunchinabox.net), she has become the Rachael Ray of bento, sharing tips and recipes, as well as the reception her meals get from her 3 1/2-year-old son, whom she refers to on the blog as Bug.