The bat doesn't need chopsticks.

June 26, 2017 3:06 PM

How did a white carton become synonymous with Chinese takeout in the U.S.?

At my workplace (in the UK) we take calls from people who have found grounded or injured bats. We tell them to contain the bat in a box with a close-fitting lid (with air holes, of course). A shoebox or ice cream tub are the examples we always suggest, but sometimes people have to improvise.

Today a colleague suggested that the caller could put the bat in a "Chinese takeaway box." Some of us carried on working as if nothing had happened. The rest of us looked at each other as if to say, "Why on earth would he think that was an appropriate thing to contain a bat in?"

It turns out that when native Londoners hear "Chinese takeaway box," they think of a flimsy little Tupperware-type container. When people from the north of England hear it, they think of a foil tray with a piece of cardboard wedged across the top. And American immigrants like me think of a white trapezoidal carton with a wire handle, often with some red faux-Oriental script and a picture of a pagoda on the side.

Pretty much every Chinese takeout I remember having in the U.S. came in such containers (I haven't lived there for nearly 20 years, so maybe it's different now), and it hadn't even occurred to me that I'd never seen them in the UK. My colleagues and my husband were familiar with them from films and TV, but thought of them as being definitely an American thing.

I was just wondering how these cartons had come to be universally used for Chinese food in the U.S., but seemingly nowhere else. Also, why aren't they used for other kinds of takeaway foods (or are they)?

posted by Perodicticus potto to Food & Drink (9 answers total)

Best answer: I wonder about that too and came across Jennifer 8 Lee's book Called the Fortune Cookie Chronicles. American invention with clever marketing! Small link here
posted by tipsyBumblebee at 3:10 PM on June 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Following tipsyBumblebee's link gave me this, from the New York Times: "Wilcox’s paper box seems to have been an advance in existing “oyster pail” technology. (The oyster pail, as described by Ernest Ingersoll in his 1880 book, “The Oyster Industry,” was “a wooden receptacle with a locked cover used in transporting raw oysters.”) ...In the 1970s, a graphic designer (whose name, sadly, has been lost to history) working at the company now known as Fold-Pak, put a pagoda on the side of the box and a stylized “Thank you” on top. Both were printed in red, a color symbolic of good fortune in China, where oyster pails are little known."
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:16 PM on June 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

I'm also finding that Chinese restaurants, at least in my area in the US, are moving away from them, which is a shame because the styrofoam containers replacing them result in a lot more spills.
posted by FencingGal at 4:00 PM on June 26, 2017

These days in the US, I mostly get Chinese in black plastic containers with clear lids. Only rice and lo mein come in the white cartons.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 5:04 PM on June 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Btw, they are also used in Australia but more for noodle
Dishes than for Chinese take away more broadly.
posted by jojobobo at 11:35 PM on June 26, 2017

My neighborhood Chinese place (Boulder, CO) puts the entree in the black and clear container that Bulgaroktonos describes, but the rice still comes in a white carton, no wire handle. I have a vague memory of getting the styrofoam clamshell for leftovers if I eat in, but it's been a while.
posted by Bruce H. at 1:01 AM on June 27, 2017

Where I grew up, as recently as the 80s or 90s, there really wasn't cheap food you could get delivered other than pizza or Chinese. (And you couldn't really get fancy stuff delivered either, unless it was catering for a big event.)

So I think I associate those paper containers with Chinese food just because they were The Cheap Delivery Container That Wasn't A Pizza Box, and Chinese food was The Cheap Delivery Option That Wasn't Pizza.

I'm sure if we'd had cheap Thai delivery or cheap Indian delivery or cheap Mexican delivery back then it would have come in the same white paper box, but we didn't, so it didn't.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:32 AM on June 27, 2017

Best answer: Several restaurants in my area (Austin) use a variant on the chinese-takeout box (all brown, no pagoda) for their takeout, but the tupperware-type plastic containers are becoming more common. Then again, the last time that I visited my parent's smaller hometown and ate a a "typical Chinese place" (your average General Tso's Chicken, garlic broccoli, eggroll, very not typicially chinese but often run by an immigrant family or two), we got the pagoda boxes for takeout. So perhaps it just has to do with that particular type of restaurant. Do British Chinese places also have those Chinese zodiac placemats where you can figure out your symbol while you were waiting?

I also think they could be made to contain bats.
posted by theweasel at 7:38 AM on June 27, 2017

As a follow up to tipsyBumblebee 's comment, MOCA's exhibit touches on that too:
http://www.mocanyc.org/exhibitions/sour_sweet_bitter_spicy
posted by TravellingCari at 12:49 PM on June 27, 2017