At your service.

A video detailing something I've never heard of that made my jaw drop.  The Atlantic Monthly headlined their short piece on it, "How 4,000 Men Hand-Deliver 175,000 Lunches Around Mumbai in One Day:"

Dabbawalla from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.

“Dabbawalla” comes from the term "tiffin dabba," referring to a tiered lunch box and “walla,” a carrier or vendor. As Saritha Rai explains in The New York Times, India’s dabbawalla network originated during the British colonial occupation after cities were flooded with new, regional workers as a way to bridge the distance [both literally and figuratively] between their work sites and their homes. Each morning, after the recipient has gone to work, family members who remain at home (mothers, wives, grandmothers, and sisters) prepare a freshly-cooked meal to be picked up by a dabbawalla, sorted and distributed at railway stations, and hand-delivered to their loved one at the office.

Today, Mumbai is home to approximately 4,000 dabbawallas who deliver tens of thousands of lunches via an intricate, 125-year-old coding system without fail. 

The NYT article is here.

 

Comments

[Christy P.]

I remember hearing about this years ago and marveling most about the fact that the workers are mostly illiterate. Now I marvel mostly at the fact that they carry the empties back in the afternoons rather than the office workers carrying them home. Seems _really_ inefficient to me, but it does keep people occupied.

They mention it is a relic from the Colonial era, but the system didn't grow up because the British said so. Think of it from a food safety perspective. In a time without refrigeration and microwaves, the notion of bringing yesterday's leftovers and heating them up for lunch couldn't occur to anyone because it was, of course, impossible.

The real market for something like this in the USA might not be for office workers, who generally have access to both fridges and microwaves, but for school kids who generally lack access to both amenities, but may have special diets or preferences that render hot school lunches inappropriate for them.

[Christy P.]

And by preferences I completely include preferences not to eat highly processed food-like substances.

[Melanie B]

Wow. That is really amazing. And the food looked really good. I loved especially the emphasis on how a mother knows exactly how her child likes his food: how much spice, how much salt. And I wondered: was the implication that the lunches were made by mothers rather than wives?

[bearing]

I actually wondered to what extent middle-class Indian families have picky children.