I remember the day well. I was six years old as I trudged to Katherine R. Smith Elementary in San Jose, California, with three boys who would’ve made excellent talent scouts for the smell police. Usually, a Hostess Fruit Pie or pink Sno Ball made lunch a bright spot in my otherwise bleak existence, but not today. Today, the stench of rotten tuna wafting from my Captain Kangaroo lunch box was so potent it could’ve been classified as a biological weapon. My companions, gagging and accusing me of harboring a dead sea creature, demanded an explanation.
Finally, I surrendered. We stopped in a field separating the Stop & Go Market from the school, and I opened the lunch box. There it was: the festering tuna sandwich, now a slimy, mayonnaise-coated abomination that had broken free from its plastic baggie and redecorated the inside of my lunchbox like a Jackson Pollock painting from a nightmare. We stared in horror at the black tuna juices, streaks of inky malevolence, and chunks of something unholy smeared all over the tin pail’s lining.
“How could you eat that?” one boy asked, his voice a mix of pity and revulsion. I shrugged, resigned to my fate. It was my lunch, after all. So, I closed the lunch box, sealing the miasma inside, and we continued our grim march to school. I placed my lunch box alongside everyone else’s in the designated coat closet, a ticking olfactory time bomb among the innocent.
Then came the Duck-and-Cover Drill. We crawled under our desks, awaiting the end-of-the-world announcement from the principal. But instead of nuclear annihilation, Mrs. Corey and the entire class were assaulted by a stench so vile it made everyone question their will to live. “Who brought a dead creature into my classroom?” she demanded, her forehead crinkling, nostrils flaring. Students squeezed their noses and made mock gagging noises, adding to the apocalyptic ambiance.
The boys I’d walked to school with pointed at my lunch box, the source of the olfactory Armageddon. Mrs. Corey approached it like a bomb disposal expert, slowly opening the lid to reveal the horror within. She gazed at the contents as if she had just uncovered a portal to the underworld. “Did your mom pack this?” she asked, her voice tinged with disbelief and horror.
I nodded. Mrs. Corey winced, a look of cosmic condemnation crossing her face, as if my entire bloodline was responsible for this culinary atrocity. She closed the lunch box with a finality that suggested she was sealing away a great evil, handed it to the teacher’s aide to place outside, and announced that my food was unfit for consumption. She then solicited volunteers to donate a part of their lunch to me, the pariah of the playground.
Too mortified to eat, I sat on my blanket, avoiding the curious and horrified stares of my classmates. My appetite was dead, much like the tuna that had ruined my day. I remained on my blanket, and imagined I looked like David Draper in that Monkees episode. Rather than be a pathetic figure in need of charity, I would be a vision of glory and strength, the focal point of everyone’s admiration. My fantasy of walking like a Skyscraper among the Shacks of Mediocrity at the beach was interrupted by my stomach growling in protest at the cruel hand fate had dealt me.
Little did I know, I had been cursed by the Shamewich–the deep, haunting sense of culinary disgrace one feels when a packed lunch goes rancid, rogue, or just plain weird—and becomes the epicenter of public ridicule. A Shamewich isn’t always a sandwich, but it’s always a moment—a sensory trauma in which your identity is temporarily replaced by the aroma of failure.
It’s the rank stench of black tuna juice wafting from your Captain Kangaroo lunchbox. It’s the entire class gagging under their desks while your lunch gets escorted out like a radioactive crime scene. A Shamewich is not just what you eat—it’s who you become in the eyes of your peers: the one whose mother packed a biohazard in bread.
Symptoms include:
- Desire to sink into the floor or self-immolate
- Permanent suspicion of mayonnaise
- Fantasies of reinvention as a muscle-bound hero from The Monkees
- Never bringing tuna to school again unless you’re ready to own the nickname “Fish Bomb”
A Shamewich leaves an emotional stain long after the mayonnaise has been wiped clean. It’s not just a bad lunch—it’s a rite of passage.
Cinemorphosis 
Leave a comment