Lunchboxes are more than just a meal; they are a way for family and loved ones to show their care. However, lunchboxes also expose individual food practices to public scrutiny and judgment, creating “lunchbox shaming” that leads to marginalization and discrimination. The rise of lunchbox-packing as a trendy social media content has further reinforced this phenomenon, perpetuating public evaluation, mostly negative, to create self-distinction and other-abjection. In this blog post, I explore comments on a video of Mama J Rae’s lunchbox-packing for her husband, posted on Instagram, to understand the role of lunchbox commentary in expressing food loathing online. By criticizing Mama J Rae’s lunchbox-making practices, commentators distinguish themselves from her, perceiving her family’s food practices as inferior and undesirable. I argue that their lunchbox commentary reinforces social hierarchies and sustains negative stereotypes about class, body image, and health.

Mama J Rae, a White American stay-at-home wife in her 30s from North Carolina, self-identifies as a “realistic lifestyle/mom content creator.” With 287k followers as of February 2025, she is well known for her Instagram videos (@mamaj.rae) in which she packs a lunchbox for her husband, who works 10 to 12-hour shifts. She also makes videos of herself cooking meals for her family of seven.

In one of her most liked lunchbox-packing videos, “Pack Hubby’s Lunch With Me! Lower Middle Class Wife,” Mama J Rae begins by grabbing the handles of a grey-colored plastic bag and giving it a few shakes to open it up. She says she is making his lunchbox with a wife-made Lunchable (an American pre-packaged meal with crackers, cheese, and meat) and a fruit tray. Reciting each item loudly, she quickly shows it to the camera before placing it into her husband’s lunchbox. The lunchbox, made of two black plastic containers, is mostly packed with large amounts of processed foods and sugary drinks: a lavish amount of pepperoni and salami, copious slices of sharp cheddar cheese, an abundant portion of sour cream topped with a generous amount of brown sugar, a packaged stack of crackers, an energy drink, a strawberry-flavored protein shake, a fruit punch beverage, a package of Uncrustables (American peanut butter and honey spread sandwich), a package of Nutter Butter (American chocolate-coated, peanut butter-flavored wafers), a bounty of strawberries cut in half, and one mandarin orange.

This video clip has garnered 133k likes and 133,157 comments as of February 2025. Since this video went viral, it has attracted many negative comments. The criticism focuses on her overreliance on pre-packaged foods and sweet drinks. The commentators display disgust toward the food items both linguistically (e.g., “Seriously gross”) with disgust markers (“Eeeeewwwww” and “yuck!”) and visually through the use of nauseated (🤢) or vomiting face (🤮) emojis. With health and nutrition references, they describe the packed foods as “diabetes in a bag” and “1000000 calories.” The commentators even characterize her lunchbox packing as “a joke” and a “kid’s meal,” suggesting that her food choices—both in terms of food portions and types—and the way she packs the items are neither serious nor appropriate for an adult male’s lunch.

In this context of lunchbox packing, the negative responses to Mama J Rae’s practices exemplify Kristeva’s notion of abjection. The commentators’ food loathing is rooted in what they perceive as a disruption of moral and social order and expectations that should align with a certain social class. This idea is also echoed by Bourdieu’s (1984) understanding of taste, defined as “first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (‘sick-making’) of the tastes of others” (56). Distinction is intricately woven into abjection in the context of food loathing.

In the lunchbox commentary on Mama J Rae’s video, self-distinction and other-abjection are articulated through food loathing in the context of social class and morality. Commentators criticize Mama J Rae by labeling her lower middle class as the “lazy class,” “the heavy weight class,” and the “ignorant class.” This class labeling implies their judgments about body image, health, and education associated with certain social class behaviors. Specifically, comments like, “Disgusting no wonder y’all overweight!” show their food loathing targets not only her lunchbox-packing practices but also her body, sometimes even extending to her husband. Many comments even claim that “she is [a] lazy ass wife knowing nothing about being a housewife and killing her husband.” This highlights how lunchbox packing is also considered a gender-specific food practice intertwined with traditional family gender roles, expecting women to nurture the family. In this context, Mama J Rae is seen as failing in her role as a good wife and disrupting the established social norms linked to lunchbox making.

Moreover, the commentators validate their food loathing by self-authorizing their role as advisors through their identities—for example, “As a dietician,” “as a physician,” “as an Asian,” “I’m French,” and “I’m from Italy.” By using these identity markers to highlight their distinction from her (a White American stay-at-home wife), the commentators assert and legitimatize the superiority of their food choice and taste through advice-giving, such as “eat more healthily,” “learn how to cook,” and “make more vegetables and freshly home cooked food.” Some even justify that her lunchbox-packing is “a good reason” why she and her family “are lower middle class and will always stay lower middle class.” This highlights how “healthy” and “appropriate” food practices are associated with higher social class behaviors, which resonates with the idea that “the poor are fat and the fat are poor,” suggesting that fatness is inherently a social class issue.

After receiving extensive criticism of her unhealthy and inappropriate food choices and practices—and by extension, supposedly her lifestyle of living unhealthily—Mama J Rae has begun to heed the “advice” from commentators in her recent videos (as of February 2025). In response to the pervasive food loathing that she encounters, she now highlights the inclusion of extra vegetables and fruit in her lunchbox-making videos, such as making a separate “veggies tray,” and moderating the amount of sauce and cream, asking the camera, “how about that much?” Through changing her lunchbox preparation methods and emphasizing “healthier” choices, Mama J Rae navigates and negotiates the complex dynamics of food loathing. Online food loathing via comments on Mama J Rae’s lunchbox-packing practices serve as a microcosm of the larger issues surrounding distinction and abjection within the context of food and taste.