On: Are SUVs Ruining Retirement Savings?

[chrisseaton]

> packing a brown bag lunch

What's the significance of a lunch bag being brown in the US?

[xeromal → chrisseaton]

There's no significance really. It's just a stereotypical lunch bag. I think most people use coolers these days, but back in the day you'd pack your sandwhich, chips, and drink in a brown paper bag to take to work.

Something like this.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41wfQvGOWFL...

[pmcjones → xeromal]

Except a Thermos bottle instead of a plastic water bottle.

[deadmetheny → chrisseaton]

It's just a generic term for a (usually low-cost) packed lunch from home, as opposed to going out and eating for lunch. It comes from how cheap lunches were packed in a brown paper back in the old days.

[kileywm → chrisseaton]

Brown bags are the classic container used to pack a lunch for a child attending school in the US. That practice dates back many generations, although I'm sure it's becoming rare in the last few decades.

[bryanlarsen → chrisseaton]

Bag lunches can also be purchased at grocery stores and restaurants. So the brown implies that the lunch was purchased at home.

In 2018 a bag lunch from a grocery or restaurant is more likely to be brown than the one packed at home but the usage remains.

[_blrj → chrisseaton]

It's the cheapest disposable lunch carry you can purchase in the US that is tightly coupled to our cultural concept of frugal food expenses.

[sokoloff → chrisseaton]

It's cheaper to make brown paper than white paper. Paper bags aren't bleached white because there's no functional need to do so.

[jryan49 → chrisseaton]

It's an idiom for a cheap lunch made at home. At US stores all the very cheap lunch-sized disposable bags are brown for the most part.

[tejtm → chrisseaton]

in the context of a lunch container it conveys "nothing special", inexpensive, utilitarian, practical as opposed to fancy , expensive, extravagant "three martini" lunch

[lawlessone → chrisseaton]

turn of phrase, just means making your own lunch.

edit: im wrong, it's an idiom.