School days are here again, which means it’s time for the annual conundrum: hot lunch or sack lunch? The problem with hot lunches is that a lot of kids don’t like them. School lunches often don’t cater to special needs, for example, if a child is a vegetarian or can’t tolerate gluten or dairy.
The alternative is taking a lunchbox or brown bag. Homemade lunches can be both cheaper and more nutritious than what the school serves. They should include a main dish or sandwich, a vegetable, some fruit and a treat, plus a drink.
Most kids are happy with a sandwich. Peanut butter and cheese pack well and don’t spoil quickly. If a sandwich includes meat (such as deli ham or turkey), make it the night before and refrigerate it so it stays cool longer. Try to get your kids to eat whole-wheat bread instead of white, or pack some whole-grain crackers for their meat and cheese instead of bread. Avoid mayonnaise if you can, or snag a few of those little packets at the fast-food condiment bar next time you’re there. Pack one of those for them to use.
A cold-pack also will help keep food cool till lunchtime. To vary the menu, pack a thermos with vegetable soup, chili, stew or other main dish. Leftovers (such as fried or roasted chicken) are great for school lunches – and if you don’t have enough for another family meal, a way to save money and keep food from being tossed.
Buy a big bag of baby carrots (get the generic or store-brand ones) and put a handful in a snack-size zipper bag. Some kids may also like celery sticks, strips of peppers, cucumber slices or zucchini sticks. Ditto for some grapes, an apple or those cute Clementine oranges. Most kids can peel the little oranges themselves, or you can buy big ones, peel and section them yourself. Avoid bananas – they spoil quickly in a lunch box and everything else will taste like banana.
Dessert? A little sweet treat won’t hurt. You can buy economy-size boxes of mini cookies at stores such as Walmart and dole out a few each day in another snack-size bag. Or look for a sale on low-fat pudding cups.
Zipper bags work great for lunch boxes, but you also can invest in some small resealable containers. Zipper bags that aren’t really dirty can be rinsed and reused, too. Generic bags are much cheaper (sometimes half the price) of name-brand bags.
A quick check of area schools shows elementary school lunches start at more than $2 per day. That’s probably on the low end for most cities. Depending on what you pack, you can do it for that or less and provide a far more nutritious lunch for your child — one he or she will actually eat. Most schools will sell brown-baggers a drink (milk or juice) separately. Juice boxes and individual bottles can be expensive unless you buy them on sale (and when else would you buy them?) or get large quantities (if you have room to store them).
Need more ideas? We’ve found a few websites that may help. Try WebMD Recipe 4 Living, Nursing Schools, Country Living and RealSimple. Each has ideas and recipes for everything from cold pasta salads to wrap sandwiches. Check them out.
The most rewarding part of the deal is that your kids come home with nothing in their lunch box but an orange peel and empty containers. Now that’s money well spent.
Photo by photostock/freedigitalphotos.net.
Another way I’ve saved a lot on lunches is by ditching the plastic baggies and going with reuseable containers. I started out with a bunch of different sizes, but it was a pain. Then I found one by Ziploc that has three compartments: one sandwich size, and two smaller ones. It’s a lot easier for the kids to keep track of and they like to help pick which fruit, veggie or snack will go in the little compartments. We also got some inexpensive collapsable plastic bottles at Walgreens that they can fill with water, tea or juice. And it sounds like the other kids think their colorful bottles are cool. The bonus is that since I pour their drinks from the fridge, the bottle helps keep the rest of their lunch cool as well. So for a small front-end investment in containers, we never have to buy plastic bags or juice boxes ever again!
bags of baby carrots and store bought mini cookies are not money savers. get a big bag of regular sized carrots for half the cost and peel and cut them up, or if your kids are old enough let them peel them. bake mini cookies, brownies, rice krispies, etc. and they will taste better as well as saving money.
i love the other comment about collapsible bottles. i’m going to look for those. we never buy juice boxes because on top of the greater cost compared to a liter bottle the boxes are usually not recycled and a horrible waste.
While peanut butter sandwiches have been the foundation of school lunches for decades, they are not always welcome in schools any more. With the dramatic increase of children with peanut allergies, many schools have banned peanut products from the building. Please check with your child’s school to see what the rules are on peanut products before packing that peanut butter sandwich!
@P. Fontes — I hadn’t heard that some schools don’t allow peanut butter sandwiches… that’s good to know! Even so, there are still plenty of other options for packing your lunch, which is good for the wallet!