Crushed naartjies and polony amagwinya: a lunchbox memory

What weird smell is awful for everyone, but brings back fond memories of a simpler time? Mine is the smell of rotting fruit. Let me explain. While the internet has made it clear that there are no unique experiences left, this one makes me feel like my childhood was the blueprint on which everyone based theirs. With every packed lunch, my extremely busy mom would add a piece of fruit just for vibes, and unless it was an apple (I hated those), it was almost guaranteed to be squished to death by my many textbooks. I’d probably discover this in third period, where I’d lift a wet exercise book soaked in crushed naartjie out of my bag and stuff it right back in because it was a stress I wasn’t ready to deal with. Plus, everything that happened in primary school was so embarrassing all the time.

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Sometimes, I would be alerted by the odour of a decomposing banana that was doomed from the moment it ripely entered the back compartment of my already overworked book bag. Once I found it, usually days later, I’d hurriedly remove the bag from my back to examine the damage and rush to the cloakroom to clean it poorly with wads of wet toilet paper.

Food was always the centre of everything I did and felt thought.

Knowing what my lunchbox was going to consist of the night before determined what kind of posture I’d take that day, the attitude with which I was going to get out of bed that morning, what kind of student I would be in the classroom. Sometimes it would even determine how my friends treated me – cut us some slack, we were kids, friendships were highly transactional back then. Leftover lasagne or bacon-and-cheese Snackwiches had me feeling like I had a fighting chance at becoming a prefect. Snacks were my currency on the playground, and I sometimes traded my Friday lunches (amagwinya with polony and cheese, hotdogs or last night’s fried chicken) with The Tuck Shop People, also known as The Break-time Royalty.

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Don’t get it twisted, I’ve had umngqusho in my lunchbox before. It was delicious, but not my finest lunch hour. Once, I sneakily opened my lunchbox in the classroom. It was egg salad. Immediately, someone yelled “Who farted?” “NguKhanya!” someone loudly declared. It was my lunchbox that had, in fact, farted.

Find the recipe for amagwinya with atchar here

I entered the workforce early in life – a few months before my 16th birthday I got a weekend job at one of Gqeberha’s oldest hotel as a commis chef who wasn’t legally allowed to be there yet. I earned R5 an hour and each hour represented a hot sausage roll, or a blue Energade from the tuck shop, which I could now afford! My brother Zibu worked at the Woolworths in Greenacres, which entitled him to discounts on some of my favourite foods – going forward, my lunchbox was packed with ripe strawberries and nectarines, blueberry muffins and chips. I invested in a cooler in which to pack my now sophisticated meals. They were called meals now.

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We really walked (more like trudged through the mud) so that today’s children could run. I see kids at sushi bars slurping sashimi and handling chopsticks with the utmost grace. Their palates are so cosmopolitan and worldly, and I believe kids have a lot more agency around what they eat now. For crying out loud, I saw a green salad on the kids’ menu that they didn’t even incentivize with strips of fried chicken! The only time I ever saw a green salad was when it was being ignored at braais.

Find the recipe for sumac-white chocolate trail mix here.

Talking to the TASTE team about what they grew up eating at school was illuminating; the conversation kicked off with issues of tuck shop money: I found out that a lot of us never received any until high school and were stuck with our soggy-by-breaktime cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. Our folks had obviously never heard of sandwich glue, a.k.a. mayonnaise. A lot of us also froze our cooldrink bottles overnight to keep them cold the whole day, which only bent them out of shape and made the contents leak through our school bags. We tried to remedy this with pieces of clingwrap – the only real guarantee being the promise of a rogue piece of wet plastic to do with whatever you chose. Lesego Madisa, our content producer, was seemingly the smartest person on our team. “I worked at the tuck shop for two years, so I got free lunch as payment.” I would’ve been fired – maybe for eating the crispy edges of cheese bubbling on the hot sandwich press, but probably for my ineptness at counting money at that pace. Our art director Katherine Botes can no longer eat apricot jam after years of having it crammed down her throat at boarding school. And all food director Abigail Donnelly wanted was a polony sandwich, and our chief copy editor Lynda Ingham-Brown wanted a sandwich on white bread (not the home-made brown loaf her mom baked). These days, our senior designer Rugshaana Abrahams orders her kids’ lunches on an app, which delivers their lunches to their classes. Huh.

Find the recipe for ooBompie here. 

I complain a lot, but in all fairness, lunchboxes of bygone eras weren’t without their golden moments. We weren’t allowed to chew gum, but Bubbaloo was different. We would risk our lives for that liquid centre. We smuggled it like we were on Border Patrol.

There were also these boiled sweets, Big Time, which were 10 cents each, so if you had R1, you had ten terrible sweets. Funny Faces were 20 cents each, the Rockefeller sweet. And there was always a container filled with bars of peanut brittle, which I think must’ve been aimed at teachers, because eating one of those was like eating peanuts preserved in resin.

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I remember Champion toffees, particularly the black ones, which inexplicably had a solid fanbase. I tried so hard to like them in my futile pursuit to be normal, but it felt like I was just asking to excavate a filling. I hated them so much, all that work, no reward whatsoever.

Then there were the pricier lunchbox specialties like Dirkie, which was literally just flavoured condensed milk in a tube, or alien spray, which was concentrated cordial with heaps of citric acid – the acidic taste was the alien part. Speaking of strange candy, who in the world conceptualised Push Pops? They were dangerous in the way that all things too good to be true were. Save some for later? More like “inadvertently fashion a shiv with which to stab my enemies”. Nik-Naks were my favourite savoury snack, even though they left my fingertips smelling like old shoes and left the roof of my mouth in shreds.

I love my dad and all, but he wasn’t very involved or present for lunchtimes. He once came to visit me at school and left me with some tuck shop money – R50. This sudden flush taught me three things: I learned what privilege was that day. And I gleefully learned what guilty parenting looked like. I also learned what happens when you treat your stomach like a trash compactor for sugary snacks. I had four caramel-stuffed doughnuts that day, and two of those short cans of Coke you used to get – my teeth were vibrating from all the sugar. I kept the change in my blazer pocket, which I spent on slap chips at Steers later. I look back now and realised I could’ve put that money towards world travel or my retirement.

CHECK OUT: Our lunchbox recipe collection 

Today, in this office-less age where many of us work from home, there is no justice. No audience. No solace in knowing you now earn enough to make a lunch the whole office will envy. In the words of George Michael, “maybe it’s better this way”. Our options at lunch time have broadened along with our wallets, waistlines and woes. I never used to look like this. I’ve been so busy reclaiming the lunchbox that I forgot it also needs to be good for you too, and not just four servings of chicken pot pie. But no matter. With all my begrudged mutterings, I realise what a lucky little kid I was. I had someone dutifully cutting sandwiches into small triangles and ironing the pleats of my school uniform every single day. I may not have always had Iced Zoo biscuits like Caitlyn or Baby-Bel cheese like Anelisa, but I had something to look forward to – two lunches, two breaktimes and the type of after-school shenanigans you had to ride the bus home to be a part of.

Find the recipe for nuke-it noodle bowl.