I'd really focus in on lettuce-free salads--I find that lettuce can get yucky while you wait but no-lettuce salads are great (think bean salad, grain salads, multi-veggie salads, etc). Plus, there's so much variety once you get rid of the salad=greens mindset.

I've been eating yogurt and an apple for lunch for a really long time. For Administrative Professional's Day, my boss gave me a really nice insulated lunch bag, so that plus an ice pack is all I need. Our office has a microwave, but it is far too gross for me to use. *Shudders*

I agree- salad and sandwiches are your way to go. I'm much happier with bring lunch when I remember to pack lots of healthy snacks. Little cans of V8, nuts, fruit, cut up veggies can go a long way in making me feel satisfied with a sandwich.

As for lunch bags: I use and like this one:
http://www.amazon.com/eBags-Slim-Lunch-Box-Black/dp/B0013KIJ0E/ref=sr_1_33?ie=UTF8&s=apparel&qid=1266355340&sr=8-33

I find that lettuce is ok as long as you pack the dressing separately. It's one more thing to worry about, I suppose, but you can still get the same tasty meal.

I also eat a lot of cold tempeh. That may just be me, but grilled and marinated and then refrigerated overnight, I find tempeh to be delightful. Hummus, pita, and veggies also makes a pretty substantial lunch minus microwave.

There are also some really good thermoses on the market now that can keep soup and that kind of thing hot for several hours if you think you'll have time to heat things up in the morning before packing.

I love Laptop Lunches' bento boxes: Laptop Lunches. They're cute, but sometimes juices escape from the box. Far more leak-proof is the BUILT lunchbag: BUILT. The latter is probably better suited to your situation.

bring whatever you want to eat that you would be happy eating at room temperature and then just leave your lunch out. in the 3 - 4 hours that pass, your lunch will not go rancid. i eat stews, pasta dishes, meat and potatoes, etc., and it's always delicious.

Bento lunches might also be a good route for you; they're kept and eaten at room temperature. Check out Just Bento for food safety concerns, ideas and recipes. Happy eating!

I always bring my mid-day meal from home. Something that jazzes it up a bit is when I model my lunch after the continental set! I find many cheeses, breads and fruits are fine (sometimes even tastier) when eaten at room temperature. So a good artisan bread, your favorite cheese and perhaps grapes or nectarines might be a nice lunch for you.

I'm lucky enough that my workplace has a microwave, so I often bring last night's leftovers for lunch (I make a lot of soup and similar one-dish meals). HOWEVER, I toted lunch to school every day for three years in high school. And I gotta say, my formula was pretty good: A sandwich, a piece of raw fruit and/or raw veggies with dip, and either a dessert thing or potato chips. It generally went veggies and dessert or chips and fruit. It was pretty balanced and actually helped me lose a couple pounds after switching from school food to homemade.

To gussy up sandwiches a little, I like to put vegetables and/or greens on them and use different "spreads" (like herbed cream cheese or butter, different mayos, mustards, etc.). My favorite "weird" sandwich is rye bread with cream cheese, sliced summer sausage/salami, english cucumber, and fresh dill. Yum!

I've also found that having sandwich fixings on hand at all times (i.e. sliced meat, cheese, and bread) make bringing lunch a lot easier.

I've also heard the quiche is completely acceptable to eat cold or at room temperature. :) I like mine warm, personally, but that's just me.

Good luck lunching!

I also love the bento boxes from Laptop Lunches. I just got their Bento 2.0 set (after using their original set almost daily for 2 years), which comes with lids for half of the containers, so if you were packing yogurt and fruit, that'd go in a lidded container, but a sandwich can go in the open container. I also got the Bento Buddies set, which gives you a bigger salad container and 2 smaller side containers. They also sell a set with the bento box, a water bottle, and a case that will hold an ice pack.

As far as what to fill your lunch with:

Sandwiches
Cut vegetables and dips (yogurt, hummus, salsa)
Dried fruit and nuts
Salads and slaws
Cheese and crackers
Muffins and quickbreads
Frittata or hard-boiled eggs

My husband and I both pack lunch daily (we work in the same office), and our typical lunch is a sandwich, crudite and dip, Trader Joe's Crunchy Curls, dried fruit, and a small piece of dark chocolate. The laptop lunchboxes work for us because it encourages us to fill it with a variety of foods.

i like the classic Stanley food jar. You know, the green one. :) (the stanley site says they're sold out, but i got mine at Target.)

http://www.stanley-pmi.com/shop/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=10-00131-003

It keeps food hot *forever* (like, 12 hours) and makes me feel hard core next to ppl w/ their little Gladware. Cleanup is easy, it holds a big portion, and doesn't retain the smell of whatever was in there. Plus it is very durable and will probably out-last me, and I love that the lid becomes a bowl.

I use it for soups/stews, pasta, leftover Thai or Vietnamese take-out, etc.

I bought my daughter one of these and now she brings warm leftovers to school all the time for lunch. She insists the food is still warm when she opens it. I got mine at Target.

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Aladdin-12oz-Micro-Lunch-bowl-Blue/9224761?sourceid=1500000000000003260370&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=9224761#ProductDetail

I'll eat almost anything cold. You might find you like leftovers cold or that they're even better that way (pad thai and pizza are two that come to mind). It's worth a try, especially if you can't heat things up.

MMM. Quiche for lunch. It's my favorite picnic meal too. Hot or cold. And I love a "green" lunch too. Avocado, peppers (bell, or banana), cucumbers, bites of broccoli.

I'm a big yogurt fan. I do 1 cup greek yogurt 1 tablespoon some kind of preserve (usually homemade, but whatever you've got is fine).

greek yogurt had a TON of protein (1 cup nonfat greek yogurt has ~24g protein) so it's really satisfying and the plain stuff has none of that yucky fake-sugar or overloaded corn syrup.

Dips crackers/bread works as well. Like a little container of hummus crackers or some homemade guacamole?

Cold noodle salads (soba peanut butter based) are always fun or cold salads based on some kind of nutty grain like wheat berries or brown rice. Plus, you can make a bunch in the beginning of the week for several lunches.

Yesterday for example I did this:
cooked wheat berries chopped salad greens cilantro mint thinly sliced red onions diced cucumber diced salt preserved lemons in one container segmented citrus (oranges, sweet limes)

And then a separate container with a mixture of olive oil lemon juice avocado chunks (The lemon keeps the avocado from browning).

I keep them separate until lunchtime, then combine. I find you don't want to dress your salad beforehand because then everything wilts!

The proportions don't really matter, just whatever strikes your fancy.

I would have to second thesamantafiles's recommendation of frittatas. They're great for using up whatever's in the fridge and they taste pretty tasty at room temperature. Add a nice green salad and you've got a balanced (and cheap) lunch.

I am a huge fan of Mr. Bento, because it means you can have leftovers for lunch. It's key to have something hot in the bottom container if you're having a hot lunch, so put tea or coffee in if you're not having soup. The top two containers will be room temperature so are quite suitable for salads and fruit and things. I've been packing my husband lunch (and now dinner, so he can work late) for almost two years now and it's my favorite kitchen tool ever.

Frittata is great warmed or room temperature. If you're serving a stew with rice or other grains, and don't like them to soak in the sauce, then put the grains on *top* of the stew. But really, you can put almost anything into a vacuum jar bento box that you'd eat at home.

Salads do get a little wilty, but we don't mind them that way. If you do, then get a little sealable container for your dressing so you can add it right when you eat it.

This is a subject near and dear to my heart!

Bento boxes are the way to go. Get a few silicone muffin cups to keep things separate. I use a simple Japanese lunchbox with one movable divider, plus the muffin cups--so I have room for, say, one main thing of leftover pasta, a side vegetable and a little muffin cup of nuts and raisins.

Here's my setup:

http://bit.ly/dclmgy

I looked at a lot of lunchboxes, and I found quite a lot of them were too big for me. This one looks shallow, but I found it to be more than ample for a satisfying lunch--maybe with an extra piece of fruit on the side. So look at your lunchbox in person before you buy, if you can.

I've been taking lunches to work for more than 10 years and never bother with refrigerating them. Call me cavalier, but I've never gotten sick. By lunchtime, my meal is room temp, and I nuke it if that's an option, but just as often, I don't.

Gourmet mag published a nice series of picnic recipes in its August 2008 issue. Here's one, and I think you can fish around and find the others:

http://bit.ly/9tR0Oj

Hope that helps! I attribute my sanity, budget and health to packed lunches!

Good thermoses can hold the heat for hours and hours. I've had hot soup for lunch from one. I've been packing myself steel cut oats for brunch (theoretically it is for breakfast but a lot of days I don't get to crack the thermos for hours) since a few great posts this winter here about them. I just pour in the boiling water and by the time I get around to eating it they are great.

I love oddly the Ikea lunchboxes. They are great for salad and then they have a little side container that you could put dressing in. Or sandwich with a little bitty salad or carrot sticks etc. They are great and just the right shape and size for me. Never had one leak so definitely recommend.

So what's wrong with sandwiches in a bag/box? everyone eats a sandwich lunch where I live (amsterdam). Or don't you have bread in america........?

Wow--there are lots of good ideas here already. Non-lettuce salads are my favourite, too. I try to make extra of the veggie parts of the evening meal so that it can form part of a salad the next day. Black cabbage salad was a recent hit in our house.

I also usually take a bag of mixed dried fruit and nuts, some cottage cheese (for a mid-morning snack), a few pieces of fruit, and homemade oatcakes.

caprese salad! mmm

abbytail, sandwiches get quite boring after awhile...

Whenever my lunches start to get dull, I turn to flickr for inspiration...the laptop lunchbox group is a good place to start (and you can make those meals in whatever your heart desires) http://www.flickr.com/groups/laptop_lunches/pool/

I also find that it's a good idea to pack meals that get soggy or wilted separately or upside down. A friend and I used to take a whole tomato into the field when we did archaeology...we'd cut it up and add it to our sandwiches there. As for upside down- make a leafy salad with all the toppings on the bottom, and the leaf lettuce on the top...same with foods with rice (stew, thai etc).

I'm lucky enough to have fridges and microwaves at work, however, my lunches rarely need either. Then again, my lunches haven't evolved much since childhood.

I have the BuiltNY lunch bag: http://www.builtny.com/lunch-main-cat.html

(People have actually thought this was my purse.)

And the Sigg lunch box:
http://mysigg.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=31

The Sigg container is very sturdy and has a seal around the top - I take this on climbing trips so it should stand up to the subway.

I usually find that things stay cold enough to last until lunch with these. And they're fun and more eco-friendly than disposable containers.

I'm another one for the grain salads. Qunioa and barley are good contenders.

For soggy-free salads, I build my salad from the top to bottom: dressing/olive oil/vinegar in the bottom of my tupperware, then a layer of vegetables or other items that benefit from a good 'soaking' in the vinaigrette and then my greens loaded on top of the other salad add-ins. When I'm ready to eat, I invert my tupperware into a larger bowl and the vinaigrette then seeps down into the greens for a fully-dressed salad. Easy.

Rosebud, you are brilliant. Now if my husband gets that job, that's how I will pack his lunch.

I pack really random lunches. They usually consist of a bread, humus or some sort of dip, a couple of types of fruit, some cold veggie like edamame or baby carrots, and a few cubes of cheese.
or
salsa, tortilla chips, avacado, chicken sandwich meat, and cheese.

I'm a snacker more than anything, so this works for me.

soba noodles!

http://abcdsofcooking.blogspot.com/2009/08/otsu.html

Thanks everyone for the wonderful tips! I'm banishing PB&J's for a while.

Best, Jen