I saw a meme while scrolling on Instagram this morning and though the concept (80’s or 90’s kids vs today’s kids) was nothing new, this one caught my attention and made the wheels start turning in my head.

It showed the lunches of school kids today versus the 90’s style lunches. We all know how this goes right, us Gen X kids grew up drinking from garden hoses, playing outside til dark, latchkey kids etc. We were/are tough and kids today, well, we handle them a little bit softer.

I don’t know if you’re up on little kids’ lunches today but they have these hard plastic “bento” box type containers that are divided up into many little spaces, both circular and square to fit like 6, 8, even 12 different types of snacks. Lunch is now a smorgasbord of food for little fingers.

For example, one of the styles that Amazon offers, in the photo shows it packed with fruit (strawberries and blueberries), carrots and broccoli, shrimp on a bed of lettuce, pasta salad with corn and cherry tomatoes in it, some either chicken nuggets or battered fish, I can’t tell which, and a small round container that looks to have ranch dressing or something in it. And that’s one of the smaller more basic lunch boxes.

By contrast, the meme I was looking at earlier showed the 90’s kid having a sandwich in a sandwich bag and a banana for lunch.

I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s and my lunches were pretty similar. A brown paper lunch bag containing a sandwich I made myself that was either peanut butter and jam or cheese whiz, a granola bar and an apple. I almost never ate the apple.

And I’m not here to defend either style of lunch, my thought on this was, are we smarter and more well informed to be offering kids a gajillion different choices of foods to eat at lunch or are we being a bit over the top?

I don’t suppose we’ll ever know and I liken it to past generations maybe thinking that when seatbelts became law, some of the older people thought to themselves, like how ridiculous, now we need to be strapped in while we’re driving? And put babies in carseats??

Although it’s a bit extreme to compare seatbelts as life saving measures to bento boxes but you get what I’m saying.

If I had an opinion, I’d probably say that we learn as we go. We’re smarter now right? We know smoking is bad and especially in pregnancy, which used to be no big deal prior to the 80’s (ish). We’ve learned about all kinds of things that are bad for us: parabens in shampoo, MSG, microwaving food in plastic containers, the list goes on.

So maybe just maybe, anything more gourmet than a Cheese Whiz (sometimes a with a slice of dill pickle in there) sandwich isn’t necessarily frivolous.