How To Prepare School Lunches

Ideally, you should be packing your child’s school food – both school lunches and snacks. This is the best way to ensure that they will eat healthily even outside your home. If your child has to buy food in school…

• Find out what kind of food is being served at the school cafeteria. Do your own investigation.
• And if your child has a daily school allowance, keep it small. Set rules on what he can and can’t buy with the money. Try to find out at the end of each day what he did with the money. The last thing you want is for him to be using up all his allowance on candies, chocolates, chips and other junk food.
• Don’t just ask about the school’s daily menu. If possible, also check to see the condition in which the food is prepared.

If you don’t want to take chances and want to prepare your child’s school food yourself, keep in mind the following tips:

1. Involve your kids in choosing and preparing the food they will take. If you send a school lunch they don’t like, odds are good that they will trade it or throw it out.
2. Know your child’s tastes—if she’ll eat anything, give her lots of variety. School lunch doesn’t have to be limited to burgers, fried chicken, or meat.
3. Choose food that will add to a healthy, balanced diet. Check with your child’s pediatrician or the school nutritionist for recommended nutrition guidelines. You can’t go wrong if you go by the ‘Food Pyramid’, which puts emphasis on eating lots of whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables.
4. Keep high-fat, salt, and sugar in moderation. This may mean using fewer processed food or fried food. If you can’t avoid it sometimes, supplement it with some carrot or turnip sticks. Your kids will later thank you for the good healthy habits formed now.
5. Add some crunch to their school lunch—and it doesn’t have to be potato chips. Try roasted peanuts or almonds or a small bag of popcorn or banana chips.
6. Kids like finger foods and they are easy to transport (and share). Cut cheese or cucumber in sticks, or slice apples in wedges. Try sending their favorite cut veggies with a small container of low-fat dip.
7. Remember to keep hot food hot, and cold food cold. This is to avoid possible food poisoning. Invest in an insulated lunch bag or thermos, which your child can use hopefully for more than one school year.
8. If you are concerned that your child is not eating lunch, do your best to find out why. It may be something as simple as an ‘un-cool’ lunchbox or food she dislikes. Ask your child when she gets home if she ate her school lunch and whether she enjoyed it.

If you’re packing healthy (yet fun and tasty) school food for your kid everyday, then a huge allowance isn’t really all that necessary. You should instead use the daily school lunch to introduce the value of money and the concept of saving to your child – aside from knowledge about healthy life choices.