Plastic lunch boxes hold onto fish smell—glass doesn't

The easiest way to keep your lunch box from smelling like last week’s fish is to stop using plastic and switch to glass.

Plastic is porous. No matter how hard you scrub, it traps the oils from fish deep in the surface. That’s why the smell comes back even after a dishwasher cycle. Glass and stainless steel don’t have that problem, so the smell simply doesn’t stick.

If you’re stuck with plastic for now, the old tricks work okay: scrub it with a baking soda paste, leave it in the sun for a few hours, or soak it in a vinegar-water mix. Those help, but they’re temporary. The container will eventually pick up odors again.

The real fix is to change what you carry fish in. Use a small glass container inside the lunch box for the fish itself, and keep the lunch box plastic. Then only the glass gets stinky, and glass cleans up perfectly.

Future you will be very happy when you open your lunch box and smell nothing.