The Trials and Tribulations of School Lunches

posted in: Motherhood 0

IMG_8933What To Pack?

I’ve been making my daughters’ lunches to go for thirteen years to date. Making school lunches is every parent’s torment. It’s a miracle when the lunch actually gets eaten. It’s so hard to think up healthy lunch options that every child will eat that are nut free. In case you missed it, all primary schools are peanut and nut free now; which, I believe, is unnecessary because all scientific evidence suggests that no one has ever died from a nut allergy unless the person with the allergy actually consumed the nuts them self. Someone eating nuts near someone with a nut allergy has never caused an allergic reaction resulting in death to date. Being nut aware is all that really needs to happen in the school lunch room. I am not being callous, I am only using common sense and scientific evidence. I personally have a serious allergy to ocean fish. I don’t think that’s it’s necessary to ban ocean fish from any place I might eat. And trust me, I am deathly allergic; even if I only smell the fish cooking, I get a horrible headache.

Allergy issues aside, even when you do manage to find something your child might actually eat, some well-meaning (but beyond irritating) lunch monitor will decide your kid can’t eat the canned peaches because they’re not fresh fruit and only fresh fruit is allowed at snack time. Yes, this really did happen to one of my daughters. At the time she was a super skinny 8-year-old who couldn’t afford to miss a meal. Yet, the school forbid her to eat her canned peaches (packed in their own juice). Thus, she had no snack to eat on that day. Sometimes, I really wish the schools would use common sense and scientific evidence before making up their own crazy rules.

Sorry, still no clue as to what to pack your little lunchers! Though, you might ask Crissy, I think she has the right idea: ASK CRISSY ABOUT SCHOOL LUNCHES.

How To Pack It?

Retro Lunch Kits Are All The Rage!

However, I despair not as I have rediscovered the perfect lunch kit. Throw away all those modern fabric style lunch kits. All they ever do is get moldy and smelly and full of bacteria (even if you wash and dry them regularly). I find fabric (even water proof plastic fabrics) become frighteningly unhygienic very quickly.

Bring back to old style metal lunch boxes! You can spill anything inside them (even milk). All you have to do is wipe clean the inside each day and they are like new. No bacteria can stick to the sleek metal walls. The cleanliness of the metal box sold me immediately but I worried that it might feel boxy and heavy in my daughter’s back pack. So I asked her, what type of lunch kit she preferred, the cloth style or the metal box style? She immediately selected the metal box. 

Pack that nut free, fresh fruit lunch in a retro metal lunch box; it’s the only type I recommend for your little lunchers!

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