Lunch bag matters

It's back to school season once again and I have some advice for adults who take their lunch to work.

You could choose a plain brown sack but its ability to protect everything securely is iffy. 

You could choose a cool-pack style lunch tote but it might be quite large amid your professional belongings that you take to work each day.

You could choose an expensive hot/cold bag depending on what you wish to spend on a lunch tote.

You could choose a trendy lunch box sporting super heroes or princesses or the latest TV cartoon character, but that might not go with your professional image.

You could choose to simply buy lunch everyday so you don't have to remember to pack your lunch or, worse yet, remember to get lunch items at the grocery store.

Or you could go with a camo lunch tote.

Camo, short for camouflage, uses a pattern to disguise an item's appearance. As you can picture, camouflage blends into the background and obscures an object's appearance. Military camo features clothing and equipment having a mottled design in green, brown, black, and sand colors to make items more difficult to be seen. Hunters use camo gear to be concealed in meadows, trees, and brush.

If you do working lunches like I do most days, you need a camo lunch bag. More times than not I'll be working away at my computer with my camo lunch bag open in front of me and I'm munching on whatever I brought for lunch. Someone walks through the open door, starts talking, sees me taking a bite of apple and says, "Oh, sorry, I didn't know you were eating."

"Of course you didn't know I was eating," I say, "because I'm using my camo lunch bag. I use that so no one can see me eating. It worked, didn't it?" 

[Nancy Linenkugel is a Sylvania Franciscan sister and chair of the department of Health Services Administration at Xavier University, Cincinnati Ohio.]