Packed lunch

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Bento packed lunch.

A packed lunch is a lunch prepared at home and carried to be eaten somewhere else, such as school, a workplace or at an outing. The food can be carried in a lunchbox or wrapped in paper, plastic or foil. While packed lunches are usually taken from home by the people who are going to eat them, in Mumbai in India tiffin boxes are most often picked up from the home and brought to workplaces later in the day by so-called dabbawallas. It is today also possible to buy packed lunches from stores in several countries.

In the United States, an informal meeting at work, over lunch, where everyone brings a packed lunch, is a brown-bag lunch or colloquially a "brown bag", the practice known as brownbagging. One such brown bag lunch was used as a deliberate rebuff, of the Chinese hosts, by the United States delegation at peace negotiations during the Korean War in Kaesong. The Chinese hosts offered lunch and watermelon to the U.S. guests, which the U.S. delegates, who considered lunching with one's opposition to be fraternizing with the enemy, rejected in favour of their own packed lunches.^[1]