Lunch Box Love

August 25, 2011

In an average K – 12 career, a child will eat lunch at school roughly 2,340 times. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Gone are the days of packing a peanut butter sandwich in a plastic zip top baggie. Not only are we forced to rethink our sandwich fillings, we are ever more aware of lunchtime waste. I’ve compiled the list below to inspire new creativity as you face yet another school year and roughly 180 school lunches.

1. Landfills are so last year. Get with the times! Consider doing away with all those plastic baggies and buying reusable sandwich and snack bags, like these.

2. As long as you are going all green, forget about the disposable utensils as well. These adorable bamboo utensil sets come in their own carrying case complete with napkin. Just be sure junior remembers not to toss them out with the half sandwich he told you he ate.

3. These cute little boxes were designed for baby food, but they’re perfect for smaller items like berries, a handful of edamame, dried soybeans, dried fruit, cereal or whole grain mini-pretzels. Let your child have fun coming up with healthy foods they’d like to put in these little containers.

4. As an alternative to small boxes, try these washable muffin cups. My son was given a set of these colorful cups as part of a baking set. We’ve never actually baked with them, but they’ve become fun containers for everything from small treasures like marbles to a handful of grapes. Consider using them in a tiffin-style lunch box to hold a stack of cucumber slices or a hard-boiled egg. I don’t recommend eating the marbles.

5. Thanks to a recent study in the journal Pediatrics (a layperson-friendly article on the study can be found here), the safety of a home-packed lunch that’s been sitting at the bottom of a warm backpack all morning is in question. We all lived to tell the story…but if you are concerned about keeping cold foods cold – at 40 degrees F, that is – consider one of these cold packs, available in flowers for girls, trucks for boys and even Yoda for the Star Wars-obsessed. Pretty neat. And reusable if you remember to pop it back in the freezer each night. Combine a fun-shaped ice pack or two with an insulated lunch bag and you need not worry about the safety of your child’s lunchtime perishables.

6. Though the moms of yesteryear gave no mind to keeping our sandwiches cold, they knew how to make certain our winter lunches warmed our bellies with hot soup. Maybe you even had a Thermos just like this one in your lunch box? Jacket weather is right around the corner, you know.

7. Who doesn’t like a warm and fuzzy love note when it’s least expected? This set of lunch box-sized notes tells your little sweetie you are thinking about her when you can’t be there. Awww. The flip side offers trivia!

8. We all get in a rut once in a while. Soy butter on wheat again, mom? Make a game out of the same old-same old with these fun sandwich cutters that literally allow you to make a jigsaw puzzle out of a sandwich. Who says it’s not nice to play with your food anyway?

9. Remember how excited you were to pick out your lunchbox when mom took you back-to-school shopping? What you carry it in is half the fun. Back in the day, Strawberry Shortcake was all the rage, but these days I might go bananas over this sassy monkey lunch bag.

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