In Defense of the Dorky Thermal Lunch Bag
My thermal lunch bag was free and it looks free. It’s bright blue and has a yellow honeycomb on the outside. The inside is that cushy reflective foil. It does its job of maintaining a type of temperature, but not super well. I love it because it honors my lunch. When I ferry it to work, it separates my meal as its own entity, worthy of a special transportation system. My cheese-vehicle-pasta-leftovers aren’t jostling around in an amorphous plastic bag. The thermal lunch bag is organized and it has some self-respect.
Small acts of compartmentalization can be affirmative. In office life particularly, lunch is a beacon of independence. It’s a literal and symbolic break in the day. The lunch bag doubles down on this. I also think it encourages taking your lunch outside. It’s always ready to go on a little adventure. When my lunch has been sadly piled into a paper bag, I feel it is a neglected lunch, a naked lunch.
Speaking of, Naked Lunch was a book that really wasn’t about what I thought it would be about. Like an ambiguous book title, the cover of a lunch bag gives only the broadest indication of content, but no details. The substance of its interior will be endlessly surprising and full of possibility. There is mystery and potential. Did you know the title Naked Lunch was a typo? Or, anyway, Allen Ginsberg misread Jack Keroauc’s note about “naked lust” and I’m glad for everyone’s sake that he did.
For all of this of course, you could have a beautiful wooden bento item or a gorgeous tin canteen. I like the squishy ugly workaday lunch bag. I think a fabric bag does a particularly good job of partitioning condensation. How does condensation happen, I wonder as consistently as it does. A squishy bag also is more flexible and can fit into bigger work bags. It has no pride or rigidity. It’s keeping to itself. To work, the radiant foil needs to face the food, so it hides its shine—which is truly the greatest luxury, isn’t it, to conceal your most scintillating feature? One of the companies that sells this material calls it Bizofol. To that, I say: wonderful work, really, love that retro-future sound.
I was inspired to get back into the thermal lunch bag life when I worked for a week at a music camp with 8-year-olds, which meant that my primary role was helping everyone find their backpacks and positive reinforcement. One child told me she had lost her lunch bag and I asked its color and she said “lots of colors” and I said, “what does it look like?” and she said “the universe,” and I thought: That’s what I want. The bag’s color was purple, by the way, and it was underneath a table.
The greatest service of the insulating lunch bag is that it prevents me from opening the communal office fridge. A communal office fridge usually discourages me about humans. There is always a miasma in there. The smell of sponge. There’s truly no point in storing a thermal bag in a refrigerator, because that little satchel’s whole life is trying its very hardest to protect the interior temperature from the exterior one, so like, WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?, I think when I see one in the fridge.
This is the time to tell you that I know they are irrepressibly dorky. They are fastidious and practical. It could be called a cooler, but it couldn’t be further from the thing. Being a slave to the aesthetic is a prison of your own making. The thermal lunch bag doesn’t care. Especially ones that don’t have a shoulder strap. When I see an adult carrying one delicately in their hand, I think, you are free. And you made yourself a meal! The thermal lunch bag honors the promise of lunch. The thermal lunch bag says, every day is a picnic.
