Hi all, I’m an anthropologist looking at how people eat well (and what that means to them!). I’m also an avid follower of r/nutrition and curious for my own and my family’s health.
Was wondering what you’d suggest as a healthy, quick lunch for a school-aged child when speed and ease are top concerns. (Think chaotic morning with no leftovers…) Are there organic Lunchable equivalents? Or good-quality sandwich meats, at least? Seems to be a trade-off between processing and “goodness.”
This isn’t an urgent concern for tomorrow or anything, so I’d welcome any and all thoughts or disagreement. I’d almost go with a couple hard-boiled free-range organic eggs with some fruit and sliced veggies, but I doubt a kid would see the appeal.
Thanks for any input, and for the fascinating discussions I’ve read so far.
We have a rice cooker with a timer that lets you set it up the night before and get hot rice in the morning. That and a $5 onigiri mold make things pretty easy. Tuna or sausage with no additives as fillings. Takes 2-3 minutes to make the onigiri, tops.
Vegetables and fruits that hold their crunch are also a great option. Chop and drop in the lunch box.
Pre-packaged stuff like lunchables is always overpriced and never as healthy as just giving the kid whole foods. It doesn’t take that long to chop up an apple or to slice a thick slab off a chunk of cheese and split it into 8 cubes.
A divided, watertight lunch box also helps a lot. I have the same four spaces to fill with food every morning. After a while I intuitively know what fits.
As far as the kid seeing the appeal, we just started healthy and simple from the beginning. So far no resistance because that’s what’s normal.
Sandwich made of whole wheat bread, organic turkey, lettuce, tomatoe slices, mild Cheddar Cheese and mustard. It’s a good balance of protein, fat, carbs and fiber.
Baby carrots, apple sauce and milk.
Snack: pretzels, bag of sugar snap peas or skinnypop popcorn.
None of these things take much time to put together before school.
I prepare the main and get the kids to do the rest. For the main, I will do a Tuna salad pitta, Sushi, pasta Pesto with black olives and Feta, or a chicken salad wrap. The kids have to choose 2 fruit, 2 veg and 2 snacks. Fruit is either, banana, apple, Grapes, Blueberries, Melon or Pineapple chunks. Veg is either, baby tomatoes, cucumber, Sliced capsicum peppers, raw baby sweetcorn, carrots or sugar snap peas. Snacks are, small preztles, Twiglets, yogurt, jelly, rice cakes, breadsticks and Dips (they like Taramasalata), chocolate covered sunflower seeds, or Popcorn. On Friday, they get to swap a snack for a treat. So maybe a packet of crisps or a chocolate snack bar. They pack their Lunchbox the second they get in from school so it reduces the stress. They are now 9 and 11. Hope this helps x
The one factor above everything - Is it real food?
I’m not sure much else really matters. If you’re following the easy cover formula I use for any meal it’s easy.
Animal protein. Quality fats.Fruit.Quality starch source if needed.
Your eggs, fruit and vegetables is a great basic idea of it. It covers B vitamins, healthy fats, fat soluble vitamins, minerals are all covered, it’s a full rounded real meal.
I myself purchased a Bentgo lunchbox for my girls. It has compartments similar to a lunchable. I packed a fruit like berries, cold veggies like broccoli, carrots, peppers, cucumbers whatever we have and what I know they will eat. I like to put a tbs or so of hummus for the veggies. Sometimes I will put yogurt or cottage cheese in another one. The main one I pack a protein so sometimes half a lunchmeat sandwich on whole grain bread, I also do chickpea salad alot, meat and crackers. I am all about using what we have. We even pack pickles or sauerkraut. Those things are full of good electrolytes. Probiotics from the kraut and it passes as a veggie in my eye.
In my family, schoolday lunches were always planned in advance. The school would publish the month’s lunch menu ahead of time, and we’d sit down and go over it day by day and mom would ask us if we wanted to eat the lunch at school, or if we wanted “cold lunch”. (Which if we were lucky wouldn’t be cold, we’d take a thermos, but that was just the name.) My mom had a calendar and she’d check before bed if we needed a lunch in the morning.
As to your anthropological concerns, I think that element of child’s choice is important. I’ve seen memes about kids screaming about things that I think are pretty clearly silly, like what direction the sandwich is cut in. But screaming aside, the general idea of kids developing their own preferences is also just a fundamental stage of life, which would be a bit silly to complain about.
So I think the best way to ensure your kids have healthy food, is to plan ahead. Ask the kid ahead of time what they want, and then do what you have to within reason to make it work. I don’t have kids yet, but I’m assuming that the things that save time when making food for adults also save time when making food for kids; and if a plan has to change, well, if your kids are like we were, we didn’t mind if, on the day of, the choice we made a month ago had to change. That just became another opportunity to make another choice.
My last opinion about child’s lunches, is that I don’t think it’s healthy to teach kids that some foods belong to them and other foods belong to adults. It’s better to teach kids that some food is healthy and other food isn’t, and then expect them to make healthy choices. I don’t have kids yet, but I’m just repeating the general way my parents raised us: we ate meals together; if my parents didn’t want to eat it, we didn’t “get to”.
As far as lunch meats… I don’t see any great problems keeping them on hand for an occasional quick meal when all else fails, as long as they’re only an occasional meal. An overall healthy diet doesn’t fail catastrophically just because one meal was “quick and dirty”.