Packaging Free Lunches

Making 200 packed lunches a year can be a chore, so make it more interesting for you and the kids with some of these easy ideas. Children often get a favourite they want to stick with day in, day out – but chances are they’ll get sick of it sooner or later. Encourage them to be a bit more adventurous, and keep the favourite in favour a bit longer.

It’s a sad fact of life that kids like fancy packaging – maybe because it reminds them of Christmas? But the Enviroschools programme and teachers are doing great work to counteract the persuasive power of the snack food industry. You can build on that at home by talking with your children about what happens to wrapping after they throw it away. Even very young kids can understand the difference between recycling and sending rubbish to landfill – and will enjoy looking for the recycling triangle on the bottom of recyclable and reusable containers.

For younger kids, choosing their own lunch box or putting stickers on it can help make it special. $2 shops sometimes have small decorated tins that are ideal for raisins or seeds.

Encourage your kids to be part of the lunch-making process. Ideally they can help make sandwiches or choose a piece of fruit – the more involved they are, the more likely they are to eat it. Showing them what’s in their lunch before it goes in their bag can help prepare a fussy eater for lunch. It also stops food coming home uneaten with the complaint; “I didn’t know it was in there.”

Research shows that young children develop most of their taste preferences in the first seven years of life. The more foods they are exposed to, the more foods they are likely to happily eat in the future. If they eat a lot of sugary, fatty and/or salty foods in those early years, they are more likely to choose those foods in the future. If they eat lots of fruit and drink lots of water as young children, they are likely to prefer those options.

When you take the time to prepare tasty and nutritious food for your family, you are:

• Helping to create healthy eating patterns for life
• Providing them with brain food for better learning and concentration
• Feeding their bodies for healthy development and active lifestyles
• Saving money by making it yourself

Savoury:

• Sushi
• Sandwiches – try different breads to mix it up eg French stick, rolls, toast bread. Get your child to write a list of top 10 sandwich fillings which you can put up on the fridge door.
• Pizza/cheese on toast – spread toast with relish, tuna, ham etc, then add cheese and grill. Cool before putting in lunch box so it doesn’t go soggy
• Pita breads – toast pita bread and fill with salad, hummus and falafel or other combination eg salad and tuna or honey and banana or cheese, tomato and lettuce
• Wraps – fill with cottage cheese or cream cheese, ham or smoked salmon and salad
• Stuffed baked potato – bake potato night before, scoop out potato and mix with grated cheese, spring onion, chilli sauce and tuna. Stuff potato, grate cheese on top and bake until cheese melted. Cool before putting in lunch box
• Left-overs – anything that’s edible cold eg roast chicken, baked kumara, pasta with pesto, fried rice, sausages, meatballs

Fruit/vegetables/seeds:

• Whole fruit – apple, pear, mandarins, grapes
• Cut fruit in leak-proof container or skewered on toothpicks as mini-kebabs – orange, gold or green kiwifruit, pineapple, berries, melon
• Dried fruit – raisins, prunes, figs, apricots, dates apples, mango – buy from bulk bin or in large packets
• Stewed apples or other stewed fruit
• Veges - Peeled carrots, fresh peas in pods, cherry tomatoes, corn cobs, cooked potato or kumara
• Pumpkin and/or sunflower seeds – toast until start to pop and add tamari at end for a change
• Fruit smoothie

Baking:

Try these easy and quick recipes (* can freeze):

• Raspberry and coconut muffins* (thanks to Jeannie Crawford, nutritionist from Health, Nutrition and Smart Food Choices) – cute, delicious fruit muffins
• Apple cake* (Alison Holst) - make a cake in under 10 minutes, with only 2 T of oil
• Pikelets * - best every pikelet recipe from the Tartaric Acid box, can replace flour with gluten-free flour and they’re still delicious
• Oaty bars - crunchy and last for ages, no flour and lots of rolled oats for stamina
• Chocolate chip biscuits – not super-healthy but guaranteed to make them smile when they open their lunch box
• Bliss balls – healthy, yummy and you don’t even need to turn the oven on

Yoghurt:

Serve in leak-proof container, add a little fruit pulp, fruit syrup or frozen berries to make a change from natural yoghurt.

Other snacks:

• Crackers and vegemite/cheese
• Container of hummus with carrot sticks or rice crackers to dip
• Small pieces of nori or cubes of cheese
• Popcorn

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