The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — The Poetry of the Packed Lunch

Subscribe to Andrew's weekly newsletter here and don't miss out on his latest writing.

The sonnet is one of my favourite forms of poetry. Don Paterson, among our greatest living sonneteers, once wrote of this ancient fourteen line poetic form ‘it is a box for [our] dreams, and represents one of the most characteristic shapes human thought can take.’ Shakespeare was one of the most famous exponents of the form, writing 154 of them, all centred around the idea of love. In some ways the sonnet as a poetic form has evolved through the centuries with some poets abandoning some of its key characteristics along the way, such as the rhyme or iambic pentameter, or need for an octet and a sestet. However, in other ways, it really hasn’t changed all that much and it’s form that keeps drawing poets back to it, to try and reinvent and take up the challenge it presents to them. It’s a poem that’s long enough to be interesting, and short enough to capture our attention, and it forms a very pleasingly condensed, bite-sized rectangular shape on the page. 

The Sonnet and the Packed Lunch - Seriously?

This idea of it being bite-sized, occurred to me the other day, as I was making a packed lunch for my eldest. I say packed lunch, it was really for him to have as a snack at the after school club, as the government provides all children his age at state primary schools with a free hot lunch. The form of the lunch box got me thinking about receptacles, and formal boundaries and limits. His lunch box is rectangular like a sonnet, and is only so deep, i.e. there is a limit to what I can fit into his lunchbox, and this made me think about choices and how limits, or limitations, or boundaries, can inspire creativity in us. Necessity really is the mother of invention. Robert Frost famously quipped that writing free verse, i.e. poetry with no limitations, was like playing tennis with the net down. While we’d still have the lines on the court, where would be the challenge in not having a net to aim the ball over, what would test our skill? I do believe that skill and technique is important in poetry, and while I’m not universally opposed to free verse, it has to be pretty damn good for me to take an interest, and this usually involves it having some self-imposed limits or structural motifs. 

Endless Possibilities and Mini-Cheddars

In any case, picture this: It’s a Tuesday morning in early December and I’m in the kitchen, with an empty lunch box in front of me. The possibilities of what I put into this box are not endless, as I must use what’s in the cupboard and fridge (limitation no. 1), and then I must prioritise leftovers (limitation no.2), and then I must get a balance of healthy foods and something gesturing towards an end-of-the-day treat (limitation no. 3), and then it must all actually fit in the box (limitation no.4), and then there’s using food that I think he’ll actually eat (limitation no.5). I could go on, but I won’t. You’ll be glad to know that I gave him a ham sandwich with wholemeal bread (the ham was a glazed one I make myself about every three weeks, as it’s significantly cheaper than the nice ham in the supermarket), with a clementine (see my other post) as well as a bag of Mini-Cheddars. When he came home, all that was left rattling around inside it was the empty bag, the orange peel and a couple of crusts (I’m working on that).

Blue Remembered Pack Lunches

I have fond memories of packed lunches. I can remember well taking that tub into primary school, and remember the feel of it being full at the start of the day, and the weight of it in my school bag, and how it rattled around the bag in the morning before lunch, compared to how it rattled in the afternoon, post-lunch. And all of this delight, even though I kind of knew what would be in it every day (it was a variation on a theme of ham, cheese, Branston Pickle, corned beef, tuna, cucumber, Heinz Salad Cream), the moment of opening the lid, hearing the pop of the lid, was always a moment to savour in what would otherwise be a pretty dreary day. And there, unveiled, would be the two halves of a corned beef sandwich with HP sauce, with an orange, bag of crisps (salt and vinegar at the start of the week, cheese and onion at the end), and a Penguin bar. And I suppose, on some level, we knew that the person who had filled that old, beaten, discoloured Tupperware box that had been passed down through our eldest siblings, we knew that person loved us. The packed lunch, then, was a love poem, a sonnet, even if it did emanate strong overtones of Branston Pickle, and grated extra mature Cheddar.

Box of Your Dreams

So, this is all to say that the parallels between the lunchbox and the sonnet are quite weirdly similar. So, the next time you take down the empty lunch box, think of it as ‘a box of your dreams’, whether those dreams include ham sandwiches and Mini-Cheddars or not, is entirely up to you, so long as you can cram it all in under the lid.