My love for To-Go Ware bamboo utensils has been well-documented on this site, here and here. One thing I haven’t yet mentioned is the company’s stainless steel food carrier, a great way to carry your lunch that’s as functional as it is attractive. The carrier is based on the Indian tiffin-box, which has become a part of a vast network dedicated to bringing meals, cooked by their wives, to Mumbai businessmen. According to Wikipedia:
In… Mumbai, the word is mostly used for light lunches prepared for working Indian men by their wives after they have left for work, and forwarded to them by Dabbawalas who use a complex system to get thousands of tiffin-boxes to their destinations. The lunches are packed in steel or tin boxes, also sometimes called tiffins or tiffin-boxes.
Since many of the Dabbawalas (the people who carry the tiffin-boxes to their destinations) are illiterate, they don’t use any documents to help them get each box to the right place. Despite this, the system is incredibly accurate. Using a basic color-coding system and very precise timing, the dabbawalas deliver the tiffin-boxes to their recipients even in volatile Mumbai monsoon weather, assuring that the Dabbawalas’ customers have home-cooked food every day. Compare this to America, where most busy people eat at restaurants for lunch, many of them fast-food chains.
It’s no wonder that the tiffin-box is catching on in the US. I’ve used mine to carry lunch to the gym and to bring a picnic to the beach, but this versatile carrier has many functions. I really want to take it camping, where it could serve as a handy way to heat food. I currently use a cast-iron pan to cook while camping, and while it works fantastically, it’s also ridiculously heavy. Using To-Go Ware’s tiffin box would lighten up the load significantly.
Another great use for this food carrier: kids’ lunches. I remember carrying either brown paper sacks or plastic lunch boxes to school as a kid, and when I think about all the other kids who did the same thing at my school, at nearby schools, and across the state and the entire country… Damn, that’s a lot of trees and plastic. Sending your progeny to school with a stainless steel carrier full of lunch is adorable, and it’s also responsible. Add a set of bamboo utensils, and suddenly your kid is the very picture of sustainability. Why teach Junior that’s it’s OK to add to the landfill when you could give them To-Go Ware instead?
To-Go Ware is available directly from the site, and you can also buy it at Gaiam, though the price is a little higher there. It’s available from many other online retailers, as well.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
David 07.30.07 at 4:02 pm
Awesome. Thanks, Kerry. This is really great, well structured info. I have spoken with numerous retailers who read, and depend on your reviews.
I want one of these!
Jenni Simmons 07.31.07 at 4:43 pm
I’ve been wanting one of these!
Jody M 08.01.07 at 10:13 am
This is incredibly funny to me. When I was very young, I remember my father, who traveled extensivly via US Navy, telling my mother about how the men would go off to work in India via trains & their wives would cook their lunches, put them in containers & send them to their husbands using the VERY same train. The husbands would eat their lunch and put the pail BACK on the train, where the wives would pick it up at the other end.
My mother thought he was full of it, of course. How could they possibly do something like this? It would never work. They had this discussion every once and a while for YEARS until, one day on PBS(?), she saw a special about this very thing. She couldn’t believe it. It has gone down in family lore.
Thank you for the chuckle. I’ll have to get her one for Christmas.