Like many South African children, my mother would send my school lunches in a lunch box. The lunch boxes, made of cheap, colourful plastic, were divided into two compartments. One compartment was for sandwiches and the other was for a juice bottle that came with the box. My mother would typically fill the bottle with a weak juice concentrate or sometimes – which always came as a shock to the system – plain water. I would usually lose my juice bottle a month or two into the school year.
The lunch box provided crush-protection for my sandwiches, but my mother additionally wrapped the sandwiches in wax paper – in order to keep the bread fresh. The grease-proof paper would be wrapped snugly over my sandwiches using a precise, intricate fold. I was always impressed by how secure this fold was. The paper never needed any tape or string to stay sealed.
I also loved the soft, matte texture of the wax paper on my hands as I would take it out of my lunch box and unwrap it on my lap during breaks. The ends of the transparent yet cloudy square of paper would be a little rough. This roughness came from it being torn off against the serrated edge of the cardboard box that the wax paper roll was sold in. I would often steal pieces of paper from this box, which I would use to trace pictures from my comic books.
As I would eat my lunch, the wax paper would act like a napkin, catching crumbs and fillings that fell from the sandwiches. When I was done eating, I would scrunch up the paper into a ball and put it back into my lunch box – which was my way of thanking the chef.
Sometimes, my mother would send my school lunches wrapped in aluminum foil. This was either because we had run out of wax paper or because the dimensions of my lunch dictated a more pliable wrapping – for example, hamburgers, cheese buns, hot dogs, or snacks like samoosas, vadas, or bhaijas.
I never liked getting my lunch wrapped in foil. It didn't feel right in my hands. It was too hard, almost sharp – I felt like I could cut myself. I was a clumsy child so this is not as ridiculous a concern as it may initially seem. One other minus of foil lunches was that it gave the impression, in my working-class primary school, that my family was rich – aluminum foil being more expensive than wax paper.
My single-parent family was far from rich but my mother, unfortunately for my street cred, wrapped lunches like a member of the bourgeoisie.
The only good thing about foil was that afterwards you could use it to make small silver dinosaurs with. You could also scrape a ball of foil on cement to make it smooth and mirror-like, which was as good a way as any to spend the dying minutes of your break.
There were, of course, other ways my mother wrapped lunches, whether it was newspaper, cling wrap or plastic bags. But only wax paper had that indefinable quality that somehow made my, say, fish finger and tomato sauce, or fried polony, or curried potatoes, or cheese and tomato sandwiches taste extra good – like they were gift-wrapped bread.