Making school lunches used to be the bane of Jennifer Hicks’s existence. One son was fine with lunch-meat sandwiches or leftovers. The other just wasn’t.
The Toronto mother solved her woes when her lunch-averse son mused aloud, “I wish I could have breakfast for lunch.”
The now-nine-year-old has been taking a container of cereal and a thermos of milk to school every day since.
“It’s not worth the battle,” Ms. Hicks says. “It makes life so much easier.”
You can’t blame her. Especially now, during the season when school-lunch dread is seeping back into the consciousness of many parents: What to make?
Your child’s tastes may have shifted from last year – from last week, even. Then there’s the nut ban. The litter-less lunch policy. And don’t forget keeping the whole thing hot. Or cold. Not to mention healthy. Is it Omega-3s that are good this year? Or is it Vitamin D? It’s enough to make any parent crumple.
Some parents are getting a head start: Ottawa mother Andrea Girones has started taste tests with her two children. It turns out her son loves celery and cucumbers dipped in strawberry yogurt, tomato sauce or ranch dip. Her daughter will also accept carrots.
Toronto dad Richard Wontorra plans to stick to his one-lunch-for-all approach for his four teenagers, rotating between hot leftovers and favourites such as tuna salad sandwiches.
Other parents vow to enlist their children in the shopping and prepping – even to take orders the night before.
“If you want them to eat it, don’t pack the stuff they don’t like,” says Joanne Saab, a registered dietitian who works in pediatric nutrition at McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton. “They will not eat it if you’re not there.”
Start the discussion about what they’d like to eat with a few rules. There has to be a vegetable and a fruit, say experts, but let them choose. Don’t pick the same foods every day.
“If we all just packed what our kids want to eat, we’d be packing Kraft Dinner and Kool-Aid,” says Ms. Saab, co-author of the upcoming book Better Food for Kids: Your Essential Guide to Nutrition for All Children from Age 2 to 10.
But don’t worry too much about the finer points of nutrition, says food sociologist Dina Rose. In her Hoboken, N.J., practice and on her website, itsnotaboutnutrition.squarespace.com, Dr. Rose tells parents to think about setting up lifelong eating habits.
“How our kids eat has nothing to do with the nutrition, really,” she says. “They’re not concerned about nutrition. They’re concerned about the pleasures of eating. Or about making themselves feel comfortable in some way.”
Dr. Rose says ensuring your children eat a variety of foods, tastes and textures, no matter how narrow their palate, is key. Even if your child eats only two things, alternate them. But she says parents often construct a masquerade around what variety means.
There is no appreciable difference in content or texture between pizza with tomato sauce and cheese, pasta with tomato sauce and cheese – and a grilled cheese with ketchup. Likewise, if breakfast is packaged oatmeal, snack is sweetened yogurt and lunch is peanut butter and jam, “It’s all highly sweet and it’s all gooey. That’s not variety.”
For her seven-year-old twin girls, Ms. Saab tries to serve sandwich lunches only once or twice a week. Other hits include hummus and pita chip, soups, pastas and leftovers such as chicken and rice pilaf. The fruit component can be unsweetened applesauce or frozen mango that thaws by lunch.
Dr. Rose suggests thinking about tapas-style meals consisting of little piles of meat, veg and cheese. Even this slight variation prepares kids to be introduced to new foods later, she says.
“Every time you’re switching it up, you’ve changed the texture, the taste, the whole experience of eating.”
