Here's how plumber Larry Qualen of Anoka, hard at work on construction of the Metrodome, described his daily brown-bag lunch. "It's just like a picnic every day," he said.
"Hard work requires hearty lunches," wrote Taste editor Ann Burckhardt in a July 29, 1981, story that had her visiting the busy construction site (the stadium would open about nine months later) and peeking into the lunch pails of some of its 300-plus workers.
Laborer Maynard Schwartz was feasting on chicken-noodle soup, tea, two apples, two oranges and two ham sandwiches. "I don't mind doing it," Schwartz said about his daily meal prep. "I was a cook in the service for two years."
After test-driving the newly installed blue plastic seats ("They're comfortable," Burckhardt decreed, although thousands of ticketholders would later disagree), she discovered other construction-site meal ideas. Meals like moose shot by a worker and cooked all day in a trailer ("Tasted a lot like beef," said Qualen), as well as pheasant, prepared on-site in a slow cooker.
"But when the summer weather's fair and the breeze is fine," wrote Burckhardt -- this was before the building's Teflon dome was installed -- Qualen had an even better idea: "Wouldn't it be nice to bring a grill and do a steak?"
RICK NELSON
