Key Points
- Baon brings back a lot of childhood memories, from your favorite lunchbox to the delicious lunch and snacks your parents packed.
- The habit of bringing baon or packed lunch dates back to the pre-industrial age, when miners and farmers realized it was a waste of time to go home for lunch, so instead, they took their lunches to work.
- Rejoice Guevara-Thomson, pastry chef, gluten-free advocate, and owner of Dovetail Cafe in Brisbane, shares healthy yet easy baon tips.
*Kwentong Palayok is SBS Filipino’s podcast series focused on Filipino food, its origins and history, and its evolution both in the homeland and Australia.
Listen to the podcast
Kwentong Palayok: What's your "baon?"
SBS Filipino
10/11/202320:41
The habit of bringing packed lunch to work or school is universal.
Filipinos call it baon, a general term used to mean 'money, food, or other provisions taken to school, work, or journey'.
One also brings baon to trips like camping, hiking, or picnics. For most people, bringing baon is wise and practical. You get to ensure there’s plenty of food to go around, as well as save money from the costs of eating out.
As far as baon goes, it triggers a sense of nostalgia and a flood of memories from childhood.
The stereotypical baon for Filipino kids in the nineties were easy-to-cook fare, often fried or processed food, such as longganisa, chicken nuggets, red hotdogs, or corned beef, paired with rice.
For Filipino-Australians these days, it depends on the preferences of the child. Some kids prefer bread, vegemite or plain ham, or cheese, while others ask for rice and a Filipino dish like sinigang.
Sinigang is a favorite childhood baon of co-host Anna Manlulo, as well as the daughter of Chef Rejoice Guevara-Thomson, resource speaker for this podcast.
Where did the habit of bringing packed lunch come from? It dates back to the pre-industrial or agrarian society when farmers and miners realised it was a waste of time to go home to eat lunch.
It was then that they started bringing lunch to work. The kids in school followed their fathers by example, and started bringing packed lunches too.
That time, lunchboxes haven’t been invented yet, so they used anything they found in the house to carry their food, such as old metal pails, empty tobacco tins, and other industrial containers. Tobacco tins, in fact, are credited as the first lunchboxes.
In 1920, some enterprising men and women fashioned the first lunchboxes that had the same industrial look. It wasn’t until 1935 that a cartoon character would show up on the front of a metal lunch container: Mickey Mouse by Disney.
Thomson, mum, and owner of Dovetail Cafe in Brisbane, who shares that making healthy baon entails home-cooked and fresh, made-from-scratch meals as much as possible, and proper meal planning.
