School Lunches, or What Am I Sposed To Do Without a Fridge?!

The tip I meant was putting a plastic bag inside the paper bag, but I do like the name tag/ sticker idea too!

I liked the two wrap recipes on the last page of the Tetra Pak site you got, Walter, thanks.

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Re: the amount of time for lunch -- that's why I didn't send meals that needed reheating even if a microwave was available. Your child might wait in line so long for the microwave that they miss their lunch entirely. You can buy stainless steel thermoses if you're worried about breakage and they come in a wide mouth style that makes packing chunky soups, chili, noodles etc easy.

Re: reusable vs. throw-away, our schools here asked the kids to bring reusable lunch kits as it cut down on the amount of garbage produced (quite apart from the environmental message it sends to kids).

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FreeDuck wrote:

Oh man. Peanut butter was about my only suggestion. Duckie hates the school lunches (and I don't blame him) so we packed something every day last year except for pizza days.

By the way, and this probably varies by district/ state/ etc. so I'll follow up anyway but I'm curious... how does that work to just get lunch occasionally? Do you send money with them and they pay for just that day?

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Yes Tai Chi, it would be better to have reusable lunch bags, but in our
school it's the opposite, they encourage paper bagged lunches, because
the kids leave so many lunch boxes behind and they mostly don't have
names on them. The task of collecting the lunch boxes, emptying the
contents (washing out containers etc.) and giving it in a lost and found bin,
was probably too much for them.

sozobe, you'll get a menu plan every month and from there you choose
the lunches - either every day or just once a week, depending on what's
on the menu. You pay upfront with your selection plan.

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Oh, Tetra Pak is just juice boxes!

We have some Trader Joe's grape juice, I grabbed one and looked on the bottom, and there was the triangly thing with

Tetra Brik,
Aseptic
Tetra Pak
printed in USA

Yeah, we definitely do the frozen juice boxes thing.

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The descriptions of little Jane's lunches are making me hungry...

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Haha, you know osso, there are times where I make lunch for her classmates too, because they ask for it, so it's no bother to make some more for you as well. Laughing

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CalamityJane wrote:

Yes Tai Chi, it would be better to have reusable lunch bags, but in our
school it's the opposite, they encourage paper bagged lunches, because
the kids leave so many lunch boxes behind and they mostly don't have
names on them. The task of collecting the lunch boxes, emptying the
contents (washing out containers etc.) and giving it in a lost and found bin,
was probably too much for them.

Sorry, I just find that bizarre. It doesn't take sending your kid to school with his lunch in an old bread bag too many times before they find their lunch bag, bring it home and hopefully put their name in it. Kids lose all kinds of stuff -- sneakers, jackets, etc. Learning to keep track of your belongings is important. (Sorry if this is considered hijacking...)

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Well Tai, we're in laid back southern California here Cool

Shortly before school end, my daughter forgot a rather expensive thermos
at school. Next day, she looked for it without success, and lost and found didn't have it either. Eight out of ten times she will remember to bring home her stuff, but things do get forgotten sooner or later.

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Little Jane's lunchs are making me hungry too.

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sozobe wrote:

FreeDuck wrote:
Oh man. Peanut butter was about my only suggestion. Duckie hates the school lunches (and I don't blame him) so we packed something every day last year except for pizza days.

By the way, and this probably varies by district/ state/ etc. so I'll follow up anyway but I'm curious... how does that work to just get lunch occasionally? Do you send money with them and they pay for just that day?

Yeah, we do that. We've also prepaid, say $10, and they let us know when he runs out. There is an online lunch pay system that our schools use too. I did that for Duckie in kindergarten (when I expected he would always eat school lunch) but then found that he wouldn't eat the food and so we play it more by ear now. He's also old enough now to count the money and can be trusted to remember to pay. I HAVE busted him buying too many chocolate milks though. :wink:

I thought 10:30 lunch was crazy early too. They did have an afternoon snack, but still.

As for camps and their brown bags, I'll wager that they don't want to be responsible for lost or stolen lunch boxes.

What kind of camp is it?

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Scout camp!

She gets to tromp around in the woods and make fires 'n' stuff. Should be fun.

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That rocks!

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

Juices (and milk) are sold in TetraPak here -

wine's the up-and-coming user of the tetrapak product.

Though that won't matter much to sozlet at this point.

~~~

I keep forgetting that Canajuns call anything in that packaging by the name of the packaging, while Muricans use the product name. It's come up in discussion at the 'other' site every now and then.

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Give the poor kid Vegemite - builds bonnie little Aussies!

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sozobe wrote:

ehBeth, can you tell me more about tetrapak? I Googled them and found their site but I can't really tell what you would GET. Do you buy products that are already packaged using their materials (if so, where?) or do you buy the materials (if so, where?) and put your own food in them?

This seems to indicate that you buy foods already packed in the Tetra Pak.

Good tip, CalamityJane. That's a standard camp thing then?

I've never had the "brown paper bag" request from a summer camp before - first time I heard it. Actually the only time for any sort of kid's lunch request that said "brown paper bag" or disposable bag was in regard to field trips - this would both be with school and with summer camp. Besides that - I've never heard brown paper bag request.

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Having been a camp counselor for years and years, the brown bag request makes sense to me.

Peanut butter is not the only nut paste on the market:

http://www.superorganicfoods.com/index.php?cPath=22&osCsid=41f63054e906d4f8e7aad2d4241d2f9f

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ossobuco wrote:

I'm so old that.... we took lunchboxes with sandwiches (aw, baloney!) and cookies/fruit and sometimes a small thermos of soup.

Mayo is famous for going bad, but I've never had it happen, to me as a child or as an adult.

By now maybe they make lunch boxes with thermal type insulation; I suppose that would help, given a sandwich is put in cold in the first place.

I'll do some nosing around online about this.

Like osso...lunch for me meant a sammich in a paper bag. What's desert? Confused

I ate tuna salad, egg salad, all manner of cheese, mayo, mustard.

Never got sick from one of those lunches. There was no air conditioning in school then, you opened a window. Everyone's lunch sat in their paper bags and lunch boxes on the shelf back in the coat room and depened on themselves to keep cool enough to keep from killing us.

I don't remember any of the other kids ever getting sick over their lunch either.

Our immune system is strong enough to withstand 3 or 4 hour old mayo.

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Homemade mayonnaise with raw eggs must be refrigerated.

The store-bought stuff (full calorie, low calorie) is made with pasturized ingredients and can stand a certain amount of room temperature. Actually the acidic quality of commercial mayonnaise (lemon, vinegar) helps fend off nasty microbes from egg salad, tuna salad, ham salad....

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I talked to a mom of four at the pool today, got lots more good advice from her too. She said she used to insert the cooler things in lunch boxes but they'd freeze the food, and she didn't notice a big difference when she stopped using them.

Milk is available at the school, we send money along with the kids for that. Sounds like you pay a certain amount ($20, say) and then the kids get put on the list, and when the money is running low they send something home as a reminder. She explained how buying occasional lunches works too but I didn't quite catch all of that one.

She also said that a mistake she made at the beginning was to provide a whole bunch of different foods -- like a main thing and then crackers and then yogurt and then cookies -- and the extra food kept coming back uneaten. Same as what someone said here earlier, about 15 minutes to eat and 15 to play. She tries to basically make one food item that has most of what the kids need (like a wrap with veggies).

She says meat sandwiches (like corned beef) seem to keep fine. She does use the insulated lunch boxes though, told me where to get 'em.

Also found out when lunches are -- 11:30, which is earlier than I expected. Food would have to keep for about 3.5 hours, not bad at all.

She said salad dressing can work well in sandwiches if you're wary of mayonnaise -- interesting points from Noddy though.

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School Lunches, or What Am I Sposed To Do Without a Fridge?!

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