Kitchen Witch: No Hot Lunch

Dear Kitchen Witch, I’m delighted the kids are back in school, but I’m as well dreading my least favorite part of the weekday routine: packing lunches. I see all the cutesy ideas on Pinterest, but who has the time or energy for that? My kids are kind of picky, though aren’t all kids? (But seriously, one hates sandwiches.

Who hates sandwiches?) Anyway, I’m out of ideas for things that are reasonably healthy that they’ll eat. What are your best lunch ideas? —No Hot Lunch Dear No Hot Lunch, Writing as a person who, as a child, hated sandwiches, I feel your pain and I as well retroactively feel the pain of my mother.

Actually, it wasn’t the sandwiches I hated so much as I hated two essential elements of most school-lunch sandwiches: peanut butter and mayonnaise. I’m sure my mother was at her wit’s end, though one day she or I (I forget which) learned that we could be putting butter on sandwiches instead of mayo, and then we were in business.

I never did really learn to like peanut butter, though now at most schools that would be a moot point. My top tip for school lunches is this: Make your kids do it. You’re probably stuck with the task until the end of, say, first grade, and you may still be using the sharp knives to cut apple slices or whatever for another year or so longer, depending on your kids and their fine motor skills.

Even in the earliest years, you can get them putting goldfish crackers in a bag or a similarly simple task. Transitioning them to making them pack their own lunches is a fantastic way to relieve you of a chore that is basically pure thankless drudgery, give them a sense of responsibility and ownership, and hopefully gain their interest and capability in the kitchen. I in addition sweetened the pot with a bump in allowance when they kicked off doing this job.

Learning to feed oneself is a key element of being a successful human, so teaching this skill early is a parenting twofer: you don’t have to do the boring thing and they get to learn. The other beauty of this system is that I also find myself 100% less concerned about or caught up in the question of how much my children ate of their lunch when I don’t feel like my labor is being wasted.

I began both my kids packing their own lunches in second grade if memory serves, and it was much like potty training and many other parenting tasks in that I suffered through an intense period of supervising and teaching something kind of dull, but after that broke through to glorious freedom. Critical to this endeavor is setting limits and expectations, obviously, around what they can and should put in that lunch, and providing items that they can pack easily.

Kids tend to like routine and probably need less variety and interest in their lunch than, say, I would prefer. For sandwich haters, you can keep on hand hearty dips (hummus, for instance), whole-grain crackers, cut-up vegetables, salami, string cheese, various cut-up vegetables, fruits, and so on.

In a pinch, when the cupboard is relatively bare, I’ve been known to suggest that they bake a frozen pizza or boil some pasta in the morning for something to take. That way, I don’t have to be getting too involved in their food choices and I can give them a sense of real ownership that benefits us all.