Chronicle No. 35 · Innovations
Bones for Bowser: How Wartime Guilt Invented the Doggy Bag
It began in 1943 as a carton for the dog. Within a decade guests were quietly taking their own dinner home in it.
Wartime America was short of food and heavy on conscience. Households were urged to feed scraps to their pets rather than waste them. Restaurants, then as now, scraped plates straight into the bin.
The first documented fix appeared in 1943, when cafes in San Francisco began offering the Pet Pakit, a carton a diner could ask for in order to carry leftovers home to the dog. The Washington Post reported on 12 September 1943 that samples of Pet Pakit bags and their dispensers had been made up and submitted.
Others followed with better branding:
- By June 1947, hotels in Seattle were handing out wax-lined paper bags labelled Bones for Bowser, printed with a small verse: "Remember the pup who's waiting / And take him a luscious bone"
- In July 1947 a cafe in Tacoma offered a greaseproof Snack-Sac
- By 1952 the American trade press was advertising a Doggie Pak for leftover steak bones
Notice that every early name invokes an animal. That was the entire point. The dog was the alibi. Taking food home for yourself was thought common, and etiquette columnists wagged their fingers at the practice for years afterwards.
The alibi did not survive contact with human beings. Guests carried the cartons home and ate the contents themselves, and the language settled on doggy bag long after the dog had stopped being involved.
There is a lesson here for anybody drafting a policy. The guest wanted their leftovers all along. What they lacked was a socially acceptable way to ask for them. We solved that once with a cartoon dog, and we are solving it again today by calling the same box a sustainability initiative.
“Remember the pup who's waiting, and take him a luscious bone”
Lesson: When guests want something they are too embarrassed to ask for, your job is to invent a dignified way of asking.
