Five tips for making a school lunch your kid will actually eat

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With a little planning, you can pack school lunches that will satisfy your kids and save you time. Photo / 123rf
With just a few tweaks and a smidgen of planning, you can pack lunches that come home eaten.

When it comes to making lunch for her five boys, reality and aspiration diverge for
Lisa Pilcher, a finance director in Chicago, the United States.

“In my head, I’m the mum who creates beautiful bento boxes with love notes to my kids,” she says. “In reality, it is an Uncrustables sandwich and a semi-mouldy piece of fruit.”
Up until the age of 10, the average child may eat more than 1000 school lunches, and for the average adult, the packing struggle can be quite real.
Work demands, personal care and other caregiving commitments can all limit aspirations of becoming a lunch aesthete. With simple planning and preparation, parents can streamline the often frustrating process on busy mornings.
Start by making a cheat sheet divided into the five categories of school lunch.
I follow my grandmother’s rhyme: “Vegetable, fruit, main, and crunch. Add a treat for healthy lunch.”
Populate those categories with foods your child loves, and this will become your shopping list. Not only does this eliminate morning guesswork, but it also creates a deep and reliable bench of options. Have fun with new frontiers of lunch food fusion: celery, strawberries, a pizzadilla and cheddar bunnies, or cucumbers, blackberries, meatballs and crackers.
Prepping your ingredients may seem like an extra step, but it saves time and effort when assembling lunches later in the week.
Caroline Flynn, a chef in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who worked at ABC Kitchen in New York, insists on organisation to lower the fluster of cooking.
“When you’re making lunch for kids, you have to have the sensation of a mise en place, ‘everything in its place’,” she said.
Chop vegetables, wash and dry fruits, proportion snacks and place them in appropriate containers to stay fresh.
Designating an area of your pantry or cabinets for nonperishable lunch items reduces movement and allows you to monitor stocking needs at a single glance.
Assembling lunch the night before is a champion move. It works out great for cold foods and drinks – especially water bottles with insulation worthy of a space shuttle. Have your children help pack the lunch so they can see and taste what they are getting the next day.
If you do this while cooking dinner, reserve some of the night’s meal for lunch, and it technically won’t count as leftovers.
“A lot of people don’t think about using their freezer,” said Lindsay Livingston, a dietitian in Westerville, Ohio.
If your child prefers hot food like pasta or rice in a thermos, divide the cooked grains (undercooked by a minute or two to preserve texture) into a muffin tin lined with plastic wrap. Freeze, remove and re-store in a sealed bag or container. Reheat individual moulds in the morning by microwaving for 90 seconds on full power, adding a tablespoon of water per serving.
If cooking can be viewed as an expression of love, is packing lunch included?
Consider Asian obento culture, where families balance flavour, texture and colour to make edible (and easier-than-you-think) creations like octopus sausage, apple bunnies and onigiri rice balls in the shape of pandas.
Some may view this as overly competitive and impractical (ahem, reverse nori Taylor Swift silhouettes), but it can also be a method of communicating love, health and joy.
“In Japan, people may not be as direct,” said Aya Horikoshi, a Manhattan lawyer who grew up near Tokyo. “Bento is a place showing how much you actually care.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kevin Noble Maillard
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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