Brown bag? Bah!

If you’re working outside of the home, it’s always a good idea to pack your own lunch. You can control what’s in the food you’re eating and it saves you a ton of money – and that’s all good. But, really, who knew lunch bags had become such an industry unto themselves?

Remember your old metal lunchboxes from grade school?

They were fun but would always end up with a faint odor of bologna, right?

As we moved on to junior high and high school, we tossed the metal lunch box for the much cooler brown bag:

I continued with the little brown bag thing until I started on Weight Watchers. Then I was eating so much food, I had to move up to plastic grocery bags. I walked into work looking like this:

Then I came across this great lunch bag at Target for about $15. It was so cute, I had to have it.

All the girls in the office oohed and aahed and I really felt like I was stylin’. But that was before I realized how many great lunch bags there are out there. I was watching QVC (I know, shocker, right?) and they were presenting this really cute “Let’s Do Lunch” bag for $18.84:

Their bag put mine to shame and made me realize maybe I wasn’t such a trendsetter, after all. So I wanted to know what else was out there.

I started at the Let’s Do Lunch site and found this cute bag (I think I have a thing for stripes):

Moving along, I then found this line of Mario Batali Insulated Totes:
Finding the Batali totes led me to the highly rated Gourmet Getaway lunch bags, made of neoprene - the same stuff wetsuits are made of. Not only does it keep your stuff cold, it actually stretches to accommodate whatever you might be jamming in there.
Or you can go all out and get some monogramming on your lunch bag. For $34.95, Stitch Atlantic will put your monogram on one of these cute bags:

And if your monogram alone doesn’t stop people from swiping your lunch, you can try these anti-theft lunch bags:

And all of this is just the tip of the lunch bag iceberg. You just can’t call it “brown bagging” anymore, can you?