One day your kids might devour the healthy sandwich or salad, or wrap in their lunch. The next, it can all change.
Don’t forget image, peer pressure, the fickleness of youth
Egg salad and tuna will get you dissed in the lunchroom. Every kid knows that. Bagel and cream cheese? B-o-oring. And what teenaged male sporting baggy pants and earbuds wants to be caught dead sucking the straw on a juicebox, even if it is 100 per cent pure?
It’s September and the mind-numbing, thankless chore of school lunches has resumed. As dread-inducing as nightly homework dramas. A battle of wills. A test of creativity. And so petty in the scheme of life’s problems, it is to laugh. Yet a mere two weeks into the school year, aren’t you already grinding your molars?
Sadly, after 12 years of shopping, packing, planning and cajoling kids into making their own damn lunches, I have little wisdom to offer. Except this: there are no secret recipes. No foolproof meals. No guarantees that just because a child is rapturous about a prosciutto, goat cheese and red pepper wrap one day means doesn’t mean he won’t toss it into the compost the next. Or that what he gobbles during summer, at the dinner table or anywhere else on the planet will hold any interest once packed in the lunch bag.
Nowhere is the current school lunch angst more clear than in the daily newspapers and parenting magazines. As surely as the leaves change colour, autumn brings a deluge of clever tips from the experts on how to ensure our offspring will chow down on tasty, nutritious lunch fare that will help their brains retain the finer points of algebra and ward off the scourge of obesity that’s sweeping the nation.
These tend to range between the obvious (instead of just using bread, switch it up with buns! Or pita! Freeze juice boxes to keep the lunch cold) to the utterly unrealistic. (Homemade sticky toffee pudding was recently featured in one newspaper. And as one online reader responded, “Are you serious? I’ll make that right after I finish dinner, do the dishes, help the kids with their homework, give them a bath and read them bedtime stories.”)
Among my personal favourite lunchtime hints are: “stock the fridge with food they’ll eat” and “don’t give your kids food they don’t like.” Not because it sounds obvious. But because when it comes to lunches, every parent knows that kids’ tastes are best described as Subject to Change Without Notice.
We’ve all been there. Five straight weeks of insisting on turkey and lettuce and then they refuse to ever touch it again. Or one of the cool kids brings Lunchables and suddenly plain old rice crackers, cheese and apple slices doesn’t cut it.
Some years ago, after someone in my household uttered the phrase “cheese strings,” I rushed out and bought a mega-pack of low-fat mozzarella ones. Brilliant invention! They love cheese! Two days later, the cheese strings had fallen out of favour. Ditto for those yogurt tube thingys, which joined the ranks of overpriced edibles you can’t bear to throw out and end up consuming late at night in front of CSI reruns.
The truth is there’s a lot more to school lunches than the food. Image, for example. Peer pressure. The fickleness of youth. And all the other things they would rather be doing than eating.
A word of advice for those of you with wee ones pleading for Lizzie McGuire lunch satchels or SpongeBob thermoses: enjoy it while you can. Because one day, you will find your teenager furtively unpacking ham and cheese on rye from plastic tubs, wrapping everything in foil and stuffing it into a plastic bag, years of eco-conscious training be damned. Apparently, lunch bags are lame when you are of a certain age. And Tupperware takes up too much room when you are lugging a 45-pound knapsack plus a saxophone on your bike.
Dipping is a big trend this year. Fruit dunked in yogurt, veggies with dip. That’s grand if you have a child who will actually be bothered to open all the containers and lift the baby carrots one by one over to the mound of hummus. Not mine. They’d rather cram something in, wipe their mouths on their shirts and get out to the soccer field ASAP.
Pasta salad is another frequent suggestion that makes enormous sense. But never underestimate the reasons your kids can come up with to nix a sensible meal. Not long ago while watching one of mine polish off a plate of tabouli, I suggested the leftovers might be ideal for lunch the next day.
“No thanks,” he said. “It’s too unmanageable.” As in, it requires a utensil. Whatever.
The only way not to go completely mad is to take one’s cues from Naked Chef Jamie Oliver. The celebrity chef has been leading a campaign to improve the quality of school lunches in Britain, dumping chicken nuggets and fries for healthier low-fat alternatives such as lentil burgers and mushroom tagliatelle. The result? Two years into the program, 424,000 students have opted out of school meal plans.
Oliver isn’t giving up, though. Over the next five years, he says, “we’ll see that negative turn to a positive.”
I’m adopting the same approach. Besides, in five years my youngest will graduate.
What’s for lunch? Here are some unique suggestions:
Use cookie cutters to make sandwiches into different shapes. Or a zigzag garnishing knife for vegetables. It’s all in the presentation, as long as the eaters aren’t over age 10.
Make kebabs of cheese chunks, cherry tomatoes, meat and cucumber slices. Or for dessert, use chunks of melon, pineapple and grapes.
A tub of cereal and a container of milk, maybe with some berries to sprinkle on top, might do. Of course, just because they eat it morning, after school and before bed doesn’t mean they’ll go for it at midday. But why not try? It’s healthy.
Pack fresh apple slices in a thermos of lemonade, which theoretically keeps the apples from turning brown. Untested, but interesting.
Pack fruit chunks instead of whole fruit, with a toothpick for eating and maybe some fruit-flavoured yogurt for dipping.
Invest in a sectioned lunch kit, with lots of compartments and only one lid to open for the finicky child.
Written by Andrea Gordon of the Toronto Star