My mother packed five brown lunch bags for years using the three food groups: sandwich, chips, dessert. She baked a 13X9 pan of brownies, bar cookies, or cake every day while we were at school. Cut small enough, this pan of sugar , flour, chocolate chips, and oil could supply after school snacks, dessert for seven, and be placed in baggies for lunches the next day. The empty pan was washed and once again filled with delicious home made batter.

Our school system does not have a hot lunch program or even cafeterias and teachers remain in their classrooms while students eat. During this shared lunchtime, I noticed adorable bags of carrots with a accompanied by dipping sauce, yogurt, cheese sticks, and an entire unpeeled orange (don’t ask) emerge from lunch boxes. I also saw thousands of pounds of these healthy lunch items thrown away, half eaten or even untouched. I decided that when my children were in school, I could better evaluate what was actually being eaten if I had the leftovers in the lunchbox to tell the story. Early in their school career, I asked my boys to leave all uneaten food in their lunch boxes. Only once has this backfired on me, and that child has never been given ice cream money since.

While emptying the uneaten sandwich out of my first grader’s lunchbox this afternoon, I was inspired to recall my first year at college. The new liberty of being able to indulge in at home no-no’s such as, well, drinking. I am pretty sure that if my mother had been my roommate, I would not have engaged in this type of drinking behavior.

One of my best friends explored her new freedom using food, not alcohol. She was raised on healthy food and gained the freshman fifteen pounds plus ten more. She went on to become a doctor because, as proven many times, a person can study and eat at the same time but combining studying and drinking is a GPA nightmare.

After having seen the waste of so-called healthy foods and the occasional junk food, I decided early in my parenting career to pack lunches my children would actually eat. I spend a lot of time with my children and I am relatively certain that they prefer sugary food to healthy food. I don’t have an unlimited food budget nor do I want my children to be hungry during the school day. In short, I am a bad mother. I have no problem packing cookies, juice box, chips, and bagged breakfast cereal for my school age children. I know these things will be eaten.

If I hadn’t spent time on the other side of the desk, I would be more concerned about what my children’s teachers would think if they inspected the contents of a Charette lunchbox. I serve relatively healthy breakfasts that may include some fruit (apple juice counts as a fruit serving right?) and a dinner plate usually has a vegetable if we are still including ketchup as a vegetable in this presidential administration. These children are not going to starve.

That being said, if the child in the seat next to my child eats carrots, yogurt, and cut up fruit at lunchtime, more power to him. Two pounds of sugar and their school bought chocolate milk is more than enough nutrition to get my children’s sixty pound bodies through the hours they spend at school.

Consult with the custodian as to which genre of lunchbox food is more often found in classroom trashcans.

A lunchbox item that should be outlawed is the thermos. Do parents really expect a six-year-old to open the lid screwed on so tightly that the contents would not spill? If the child can get the vacuum-sealed lid off, we now expect the little one to concentrate while sitting with a group of peers and pour the liquid into the tiny cup that was the top of the thermos? Buy the milk or splurge on a juicebox. Make everyone’s life easier.