Lunch: It’s in the Bag

The morning battle begins with the bag, even before kids beg to wear spaghetti-strap tops or ripped jeans. What to pack for lunch? They want to bring stuff that sends junk-food alarms ringing in parents’ heads; parents want them to take stuff that probably gets traded or tossed.

With a little planning and creativity from both parent and child, though, brown-bagging it can be a good thing. Contain the conflict to the closet.

Important rules for school lunches, especially for young children wooed by the playground, are not to send too much and to send foods that are easy to eat.

“If it’s not [easy], kids will probably throw it away,” says Connie Evers, a dietitian in Portland, Ore., and author of books and a Web site on children’s nutrition. That means peeling and sectioning oranges; scooping melon balls and sending them in small containers; slicing apples.

Send finger foods such as string cheese, trail mix and soy nuts. Keep in mind that sandwiches, yogurts and other foods needing refrigeration should be packed with refreezable gel packs in insulated lunch bags. That can be a problem, though, particularly for middle schoolers concerned about how a lunch box looks.

“They only want brown bags. Anything else is baby-ish,” says Evers, who learned first-hand from her children. She’s working on packing variations of peanut butter, which has a good shelf life.

Short on time? Look to last night’s leftovers, such as cold pizza, which offers a good supply of calcium from the cheese, or part of a leftover stir-fry wrapped in a tortilla. Packaged products certainly are convenient, so make the most of them: Choose calcium-fortified juices, low-fat versions of snacks, baked chips.

Don’t fret if lunch isn’t perfectly balanced every day or if a lunch seems boring, says Jo Ann Hattner, a clinical dietitian with Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University. “You can make up [for nutrition] at other meals during the day,” she says. “I wouldn’t worry too much about the younger child who wants to take peanut butter and jelly every day. The most important thing is that they eat it.”

Have children help shop for, select or prepare the lunches.

“Kids are so impressed with themselves that they’ve made it that they’re more willing to eat it,” says Michelle Moore of South Pasadena, who teaches kids cooking classes at Bristol Farms and Sur La Table stores. When shopping, scour the aisles with the kids. Study popular lunch-kit foods, look for new products, read nutrition labels. Make the store visit educational.

Instead of relying on the ready-made lunches, assemble your own, Moore says. Send crackers. Cut lunch meats into squares. Put them in lunch boxes with divided areas or in small containers.

Replace the same old boring sandwich by slipping the filling into a sliced mini-croissant or roll. Fill one roll with tuna, another with turkey to make things interesting. Wrap sandwich meats in tortillas, too, and roll them up. Slice them into bite-sized pieces. Call them something catchy--such as pinwheels--to interest kids.

If the kids aren’t big on veggies or tire easily of sandwiches, slip in the vegetables by sending slices of quick breads such as zucchini spread with cream cheese. Need even more change? Use a flavored cream cheese. Another idea of Moore’s is to make a no-bake cookie ball as a main dish: Mix together, then roll into balls, peanut butter, nonfat milk and honey. If that’s too sweet an option, send peanut butter for dipping cut-up sticks of carrots and celery.

Carry the dip idea further with salsa as a dipper for pretzels, crackers, pita chips or other tortilla roll-ups. Another easy dipping sauce: small packages or containers of salad dressing.

“My kids will eat as many vegetables as there are dipping sauces,” says April Berg of Long Beach, who teaches school-lunch-packing classes for adults for the cities of Lakewood and Huntington Beach.

Berg lures kids into their lunches by involving them at packing time and making it fun. In her classes, she teaches a system she uses with her 6- and 8-year-old boys.

First, she shops from a list on Sundays, then packages some foods for the week ahead, such as fruits and vegetables. Each school-day morning, the boys pick from baskets in a mini-buffet which hold snacks, such as granola bars and chips; fruits, such as grapes, nectarines and bananas; and cut-up vegetables. They must pick one from each.

“One woman I know puts a chalkboard on the refrigerator and writes a couple of choices, like ham and bologna sandwiches, and the kids pick from the menu. They think it’s like ordering in a restaurant,” she says.