5 Tips for Making a School Lunch Your Kid Will Actually Eat
The New York Times
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. “In my head, I’m the mom who creates beautiful bento boxes with love notes to my kids,” she says. “In reality, it is an Uncrustables sandwich and a semi-moldy piece of fruit.”
From kindergarten through fifth grade, the average American child may eat more than 1,000 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, Fla., who worked at ABC Kitchen in New York, insists on organization 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, preportion 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 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.
