A typical Indian lunch box contains traditional meals with a balanced portion of carbohydrates, proteins, fibre, and fats. The basic idea is to have a meal with multiple grains, colourful fruits and vegetables, healthy proteins, and a small portion of healthy fats.
You have multiple choices in meals and snacks to fuel an active lifestyle, and you enjoy mouthwatering, aromatic, savoury, fresh, and nourishing recipes to satiate cravings.
The Indian Lunch Box System is based on the accurate delivery of everyday meals prepared by personal home chefs for people busy with jobs. Those away from home looking for their favourite daily meal get these boxes delivered to their workplaces.
The modern lunchtime meal goes beyond the soups and sandwiches. Food is not just about stuffing yourself with calories to satisfy your palate; you need a full, healthy, conscious meal with many vegetables and fruits to get all the nutrition for the day and not crave junk.
A lunchtime meal box must have multiple small boxes with exciting creative delicacies prepared without extra processing. Furthermore, office goers are bored of the same menu at lunchtime and seek multiple cuisines.
Hence, they have been taking time off their computer screens to prepare nutritious and heartwarming delicious meals for the day, or they order food on an app or search for it at a neighbourhood food joint and the delivery is done to meet modern convenience.
Food is invariably connected to childhood memories, and this is what we expect to see in neatly packed Indian tiffin boxes. A home-cooked Indian tiffin box contains a variety of recipes rotated weekly by expert home chefs. These chefs bring exotic Punjabi, Marwadi, Jain, South Indian, keto, low carb, low fat, low calorie, and other wholesome Indian food to your desks.
Takeout is not new; there have been many advanced societies where people had food delivery systems and community meal servings where food was transported in boxes. Tiffins were part of religious activities, and silver and brass container boxes were used to store food items. The brass or silver container boxes or mud pots filled with rich foods were gifted to people.
The early Indian tiffin box containers made of brass did not add leaching flavour to the food like iron or tin containers. The large pot-like brass tiffins with lids were the carrier boxes with four to five pails secured with rope-like clamps.
One can find such containers even in the Mughal kitchens, where the pots and pans were transported on heads without a drop spilling. The Arabic Safratas used similar stacked containers to transport foods.
Earlier in the 1500s, individually portioned food was carried in bamboo boxes to places.
In 1800, lunchboxes were famous in Europe and the US, where miners carried toolbox-like container boxes to work.
Later, in 1900, such container boxes served food at transport junctions, railways, and hotels. In India, the boxes were used to accommodate many things, especially Indian-styled meals with the right portion of curries, kebabs, and rice.
People have been searching for convenience and nutrition for lunchtime to encourage productivity. In smaller towns and villages, office workers may return home to have a lunchtime feast with family, and many cities provide workers with over an hour of lunch break to allow them to have a complete meal.
In larger cities, people go for sandwiches, snack bars, samosas, pizza at Taglio, or light meals to suit their appetites. Indian tiffin boxes provide affordable hot lunches for those who cannot come home for lunch.
The tiffin wallahs of Mumbai developed a network of delivery men who would collect fresh, home-cooked food and transport it to the office areas before lunchtime at a very low cost. The lunch box contains stir-fried vegetables, lentil curries, rice, chapatti flatbread, and a desi beverage adequate to give energy and nourishment for the rest of the hectic workday.
British love the no-frills tuna sandwiches and potato soup served with coffee. Sliced sausages, curry ketchup, chips, or cheese sandwiches are preferred for a shorter lunch break. Studies claim that people in the UK are bored of potato soup and tuna sandwiches and desire to try other favourite lunchtime meals.
Many options are available; for instance, a flattened meal with breadcrumbs served with buttery new potatoes and fresh green salad is a great Austrian alternative to a regular British lunchtime meal. The rich barbeque meat with gravy, a stew of slow-cooked vegetables served with rice, is a refreshing option.
The most common food office workers eat in the US is pepperoni pizza, which they can eat while staying hooked on computer screens. It is a popular lunchtime favourite, and the worker can have it with sugary chocolate ice cream or cola.
Vietnamese lunchtime meals include crispy, savoury pancakes made of rice flour ladened with flash-fried pork, vegetables, and prawns. You can also get the Banhmmi, a crusty roll similar to the baguette stuffed with braised meat, cucumber, crispy shredded carrot, radish, and chillies.
Japanese workers are known to carry the Bento boxes, which are filled with hot and cold components and meals that are fast and filling,
Kenyan meals often contain fried or smoked fish, stiff maize porridge (ugali), and veggies—that are often rich and filling.
A typical Turkish delicacy box may include a flatbread-shaped pizza with spinach or slow-cooked lamb and feta toppings.
The concept of the Tiffin Indian lunch box is not new; one can find it in traditional stories where travellers carried food to places in cotton bags, metal or mud pots. The travellers going to places for business would rest and replenish their stock at rest houses built in different parts of the cities.
Across temples in India, you can find the long-standing tradition of feeding the masses, where travellers enjoyed a stay and were served rich, wholesome, delicious meals prepared in authentic style, sanctified, and served for free or at a small price. The temple cuisine is unique to each location and difficult to replicate at home. The temple cooks who transported food without spilling used the Tiffin carrier.
The initial Indian tiffin box carriers were made with bamboo sticks and ropes, where the pot-sized boxes and pans were stacked on one another and secured with coir to prevent spilling. Also, the frame of the pots was fixed so smaller-sized pails could be kept anywhere, while the food carried to the place included all the items served in a thali meal.
The practice of preparing extensive meals with multiple vegetables, rice, lentils and desserts and transporting them to the main temple before serving them to devotees is part of the temple culture.
Since food preparation is part of the divine offering, complete care is taken to maintain sanctity to avoid contamination or degradation of food. A friction clamp is added to the tiffin carrier to avoid spilling. It is made with ropes, and pots are fixed together with ropes, just like the ones used to store milk and curd.
Many established chefs try to prepare temple meals at high-end restaurants. Still, the ultimate magic of the preparation style, utensils and ingredients used in temple kitchens, prepared by experts using authentic local ingredients, allows it to be incredible and unique.
The priests would prepare specific recipes in clay pots and transport them across the temple for final serving to the divine before lunch. For instance, in the Jagannath Temple of Odisha, as per the 12th-century tradition, over 56 recipes are offered to the divine, and more than 40 vegetables and lentils are used to cook the meals. It included six rice recipes, ten sweets and many other items prepared by expert chefs.
Even in South Indian temples, the elegant Indian tiffin box carriers were carved in a specific manner and transported from one place to another with offerings of rich, nutritious, and flavoursome meals for the divine. After the offerings, the food was distributed to the devotees.
A home-cooked office Indian lunch box can be a deeply personal package reflecting the family culture and heritage. Those burdened by hectic schedules, taking care of children, and parents can get home-cooked meals often with options like low-fat, low-calorie, low-sugar, keto, vegan, and others. Home chefs prepare the meals, especially for those who do not have time to prepare rich, authentic, mouthwatering multiple recipes in their fast-paced working lives.
The modern office Indian lunch box model is for young professionals, students, and busy office goers who require healthy, simple homemade food that is not very fancy but nutritious but includes multiple items to fulfil the person's everyday hunger and nutritional requirements. An office Indian lunch box presents plenty of choices, and there is always something new for people bored of having the same lunch every time.
The home cooks provide affordable choices that combine the goodness of warm and fresh foods such as lentil curry, vegetable curry, stir-fried vegetables, chapattis, and salads. It provides a unique initiative where the network of home cooks and delivery men brings additive-free nutritious foods to your office repast.
A classical Indian office lunch box is prepped with fresh ingredients and stored in stacked vertical stainless steel or glass containers. Indian foods include many regional recipes, and you can choose from the menu, proposing a diverse culinary selection from multiple regions.
Indian food box delivery chains handled by the dabbawalas are famous for their delivery accuracy, and the dabbawalas have been doing it for over 125 years. Nowadays, we order food online and wait for delivery to our desk, but dabbawalas functioning on bicycles collecting lunchboxes from customers from remote locations, and delivering hundreds and thousands of home-cooked meals to workers in the offices just before lunchtime without delay is considered one of the most efficient logistics systems in the world.
It is a network of unskilled workers who handle the delivery of Indian food boxes well in a two-tier management system. There is scope for many types of errors in delivery, such as the wrong destination, broken tiffins, or lost tiffins, but the dabbawalas rarely make a mistake.
A study by Harward found that dabbawalas made less than 3.4 mistakes in a million transactions, and they delivered roughly 200,000 customers each day, which means approximately 400 deals or missed dabbas in a year.
Dabbawalas do not deliver restaurant foods like Deliveroo and Uber Eats; they pick up home-cooked meals from customers and deliver them in time for lunch. The service is cheap, and people enjoy freshly prepared home-cooked meals at their office tables.
Lunchboxes must reach the client by 13.00, and the dabbawalas try to reach by 12. If someone delays, they have a stand-by to deliver the boxes, which can take up to three hours to complete. If the home cook takes more time to prepare, they are dropped to maintain the routine. Since the dabba must be delivered on time, it is common to see people giving way to the delivery men to avoid a delay.
Indian meal boxes are often served as thali, and you can add your favourite dish from regional cuisine to enjoy a different flavour during the lunch hour. A vegetarian thali contains a lot of greens, lentils, rice, roti and dairy options, or you can have one with meat and seafood.
A typical North Indian thali contains a rich lentil stew (dal makhani), paneer curry, steamed cumin rice, papadum, rolls and vegetables, fries, yoghurt, and a dessert.
A South Indian thali is often served with thin spicy soup (rasam), rice pudding (kheer), and steamed rice, a vegetable cooked with coconut (poriyal / thoran), chutneys, sambar (vegetable and lentil soups) and pickle.
One of the most popular dishes carried by many in Indian tiffin box is Biryani, which contains many meats or vegetables cooked with flavoured rice.