Recipes Rescue Kids’ Lunches from PBJ Boredom

My first-born is now a first-grader.

The school day is longer, there will be homework, and ... his lunch will be eaten in a remote location.

Through the spring I wondered: pack or pay? School lunch isn’t expensive, and quality looked acceptable. But eventually I decided that since my mother packed my lunches, I was going to pack them for my kids.

Time to hit the library.

While there are not as many school lunch cookbooks as there are, say, cookie cookbooks or throw-a-party cookbooks, there were enough to get me started.

Brown Bag Success: Making Healthy Lunches Your Kids Won’t Trade, by nutritionists Sandra K. Nissenberg and Barbara N. Pearl, is small and inexpensive and doesn’t waste space on things my son wouldn’t dream of eating.

The soup and sandwich sections start with categories to mix and match. The recipes are pitch-perfect for kids: Check out “Inside-Out Cheese Sandwiches,” in which the cheese is on the outside, the bread on the inside, smashed together with a rolling pin.

The “Personal Touch” section steeled my resolve as I recalled the little stick figures sketched on my own lunch bags by a mother who never allowed her lack of artistic training to get in the way of a good laugh.

But it was the monthly menu that really sold me. Right there, on pages 20–21, is four weeks’ worth of proof that packed lunches don’t have to be boring.

My other favorite isn’t exactly a lunch book, but it addresses my fears from a different angle. I’m afraid my vegetable- packing, like my son’s vegetable-eating, will largely consist of pre-cut carrots and broccoli.

In Gimme Five!, Nicola Graimes offers techniques for making fruits and veggies palatable and loads of concise information about the particular benefits of each food.

Graimes gives enticing (though not necessarily packable) recipes, only one per food, but lots of serving suggestions as well. “Sticky Date Muffins with Toffee Sauce” sounds like the sort of thing my son wouldn’t trade. And I think I could sneak some grated celeriac into the coleslaw he willingly consumes.

But as Ann Cooper and Lisa M. Holmes point out in Lunch Lessons, even if I’m packing lunches, I still should pay attention to what’s being served in school. “[I]f all the cool kids eat fast food, fast food will be the food of choice no matter what Mom and Dad are cooking at home.” Oh, dear.

Cooper and Holmes review the history of food served at school. They discuss why the Spiderman lunch box my son got for his birthday might give me second thoughts, and tell inspiring stories of projects that bring locally grown food into the schools.

Their recipes for breakfast and lunch are a bit more complicated than those in Brown Bag Success, interspersed with little items about the contents of Chicken McNuggets that inspire me to work harder.

My son’s first school lunch comprised leftover pasta-with-broccoli, a slice of bread with jam, a small apple, a frozen juice box to keep the pasta cool (tip from my summer reading), and two cookies.

He liked it, and he even remembered to bring home the container and the fork.