Many years ago Magda said somewhere that she had taken the path of least resistance with school lunches.
Magda had been trying to send a variety of school lunches as Instagram and nutritionists tell us we need to do. Her kids wouldn’t eat or complained about what she sent. Every week she felt stress about school lunches and they were a real thorn in her side.
Frustrated, Magda decided to her ask her kids what they ideally wanted for lunch. One wanted the exact same simple school lunch packed from home everyday and the other wanted to buy his lunch.
Boom. She went with what they wanted and her school lunch stress disappeared.
School lunches can be incredibly stressful for families.
The menu planning and packing of school lunches hit our Zenith of stress a few years ago when one of our kids wasn’t eating the food provided at his daycare program. Our school age child also needed packed lunches. Both needed nut-free packed lunches that they would actually eat. Soon after that all three kids needed packed lunches most days of the week.
I’m going to share how we simplified school lunches and some amazing ideas from other families and cooks on keeping school lunches manageable. They all share a similar edict of not being too fussy or fancy. While I like seeing those beautiful bento box lunches on Instagram, I love having a quick stress-free school lunch method more.
How we simplified our school lunches:
We eat a lot of the same foods. Our fridge is stocked with a lot of cut up veggies and fruit like apples, oranges, grapes, cucumbers, carrots, peppers. We always have these foods on hand because the kids like them and they’re easy and quick to put in school lunches. Sure, sometimes they get strawberries in their lunch or some leftover broccoli. But they mostly get the same fruits and vegetables for school lunches.
Two of my children currently struggle with keeping weight on. One of them is a very slow eater. Both would prefer to play outside during lunch hour than eat. This often results in horrific hunger meltdowns after school which are no fun for anyone.
I don’t use their lunch hour as a time to introduce new foods to my kids. It’s simple things they’ve had before and that I know they like.
I batch bake/cook and freeze items for school lunches. My children do like some variety and if we send the same thing a few days in a row as their ‘main’ they start to eat less of it.
One Sunday afternoon a month we make a bunch of items like mini banana muffins, cheese corn muffins, pizzas on mini nann bread, chocolate chews (dates, cocoa, oats, coconut) and freeze them. It’s a huge time saver to have part of the school lunch ready in the freezer.
The fake peanut butter sandwich is always an option. The local schools recently moved to being nut-free so we’re back to peanut butter substitutes. A PB sandwich is on the lunch menu at least once a week.
One set of school lunch containers for each child.
We have one set of lunch containers for each child. This GREATLY simplifies things for our family. I think it was about two years ago when I invested in the YumBox panino bento box lunch containers. Everyone in the family has one (they are great for picnics and trips). The kids use the same lunch containers everyday.
One set of lunch containers means we have to have a system and routine where we clean them out each night. It also – hallelujah! – means we don’t have a lot of plastic containers at our house. There are a few for dinner leftovers that I could send with the kids in a pinch if they forgot their YumBox at school.
The YumBox bentos have also made school lunches simpler because they’re easy to pack. My husband finds them easy and the kids are starting to learn how to pack their own lunches with them. The separated areas of the container make it easy to send an assortment of foods.
This fall the kids all added the YumBox mini snack box to their school lunches. I debated the investment for a long time – these things are not cheap! – but the larger paninos have held up really well.
But you don’t need fancy Bento box containers to simplify things. While I love YumBox for many reasons, any simple lunch container will do.
School lunches are packed the night before. Our schedule sometimes changes but right now we pack lunches the night before. Sometimes it’s even before dinner is served. At other times I have packed school lunches in the early morning as part of my early early morning routine.
Get the kids to help pack school lunches. I know this can often slow the process down, but getting kids comfortable with making their own school lunches is the ultimate way to simplify.
Don’t worry about what everyone else is packing for school lunch. Comparison is the thief of joy. If you want school lunches to be your thing, if you love putting googly eyes on a sandwich or making radish roses for your toddler to eat, enjoy that. If you just want your kids to eat lunch and for it not to be a big and stressful burden on your family, stop comparing.
Sure, I see and hear of some amazing school lunches. The Internet is full of incredible school lunch ideas. But that’s not my thing. It’s not what I want to spend my time on or become good at. You can appreciate a cool looking Halloween themed school lunch while also knowing it’s not something you want to spend time on.
One tip for saving money on school lunches.
The usual tips for saving money on school lunches apply. Don’t buy single package items. Try to make items from scratch if you have the time. But one way we’re trying to save money on school lunches is by reducing food waste.
The kids don’t empty out the remains of their school lunch into the compost bin. They put school lunch leftovers on the dining table for an after school snack or as an addition to dinner. If they still aren’t eaten I may include them in the next day’s lunch.
We often like to focus on frugal school lunches to save money. But I can tell you that for my family, when there are days when a child comes home with an almost untouched lunch, reducing food waste is my biggest money saver.
More ideas for simplifying school lunches.
Send leftovers. A friend of mine always set aside enough of the previous night’s dinner to send it as lunch the next day. She heats things up in the morning and puts them in a thermos. Add in a few snacks and she’s done. Their school lunches plan was part of their dinner plan.
Pay for school lunch. If this is an option, fits your budget and makes your life easier, do it. I really enjoyed the school lunch option when we lived overseas. It was 2 pounds a day and at the time, with a newborn and toddler at home, it really saved me time and stress.
Have a system for the year. My sister-in-law does a day of the week system based on the letter of the day. Mondays are meatballs, Wednesday is wraps, you get the idea. She preps and buys in bulk. She puts things out in the morning and her kids pack their own lunches.
If you pack school lunches how do you keep them low stress?
Great tips here. I have also recently invested in a single container for all three of my kids and it makes cleanup much easier. Do you even eat things like cold meat that have been in the box all day? My three sometimes come home with a ham sandwich or slice of turkey leftover, and I tend to throw it away because I worry about it having been at room temp for so many hours. My lunch formula is pretty much 1x protein, 2x fruit, 1x crackers/bread/bagel, and 1x sweet thing (home made, but granola bars are a shop-bought favourite). I’d LOVE to get more veg in, but they just bring it home. I tend to give them some anyway once a week so they at least get used to the idea of having raw veg in their lunches. I quite like packing them, and the kids much prefer them to school dinners, so not too stressful, which I’m grateful for!
Meat: I’ll put a cold pack in the lunch bag if there is meat in there. But we don’t pack meat often.
Vegetables are more frequently still in the lunch box (fruit is always eaten) but we just add it to our dinner as a side. The food waste from school lunches has really bothered me over the years so we’re really trying to eliminate it.
I like your lunch formula 🙂
My “lunch hack” is that I always prepare extra portions of dinner, and that becomes everyone’s lunches the next day. The kids’ lunches will consist of:
1. A portion of the previous night’s main course from dinner.
2. Vegetable – either leftover veggie from dinner, or more often, just some raw, cut vegetables, such as baby carrots, snap peas, bell pepper, grape tomatoes, cucumbers. I buy the little Kirkland humous cups from Costco, and sometimes throw those in for dipping.
3. Fresh fruit, e.g. apple/pear slices, mandarin orange segments, grapes, sometimes pieces of pre-cut melon from the grocery store, a banana.
4. Snack, e.g. Motts unsweetened fruit cups, individual serving of Greek yoghurt, Mini Babybels, cheesestrings, a few slices of deli meat (all from Costco).
I pack their lunches in Rubbermaid Lunchblox containers, and if the main course is something sloppy (like stew), then I use a small glass containers for that, because the lids seal better. I have two sets of containers per kid so that I can just throw everything in the dishwasher.
It takes about 5 min to put a lunch together. There’s a good combination of predictability (all their lunches being the same formula) and variety (the main course changes according to dinner).
I loved your daycare lunches posts on Facebook back in the day. I was often thinking, I want that lunch!!
They’re still basically eating the same lunches. They haven’t complained yet, so why mess with what works? Hahaha.
Well, I was raised by a single mom back in the dark ages, aka the 1970s, and by the time I was in the 2nd grade, my mother was totally burnt out with the whole school lunch thing. So she came up with a clever solution. She bumped up our allowances from $1 per week to $5 per week. If we wanted to buy lunch that was enough to cover the cost, but we had the option of making our own lunch and pocketing the money.
My brother chose to buy lunch, and I chose to pocket the money. I could put whatever I wanted (within reason) on the shopping list, but it was my responsibility to make and pack my own lunch, as well as any dishes or clean up (which was sort of a given since all of the household dishes were my responsibility anyhow.) Of course, that was in the days before pre-packaged everything – and we were never allowed to have things like cookies anyhow, but I was delighted to have the option for a turkey or ham sandwich rather than bologna or tuna fish like my mom always tried to make me eat.
It sorta makes me chuckle to realize that both my brother and I carried our lunch habits into our adult lives. I seldom, if ever, am willing to shell out the money to go out to eat, but for my brother, ordering food is just a day to day reality. Anyhow, it taught me a great deal about food prep as well as responsibility and frugality.
I ❤️ This! I cannot remember ever NOT packing my own lunch as a kid! Your Mom was clever!
I had a PB sandwich and an apple for lunch most days. When I was young an older sibling made it for me.
Love that your mother gave financial management decisions to you at such a young age.
The Yumbox was perfect when my kids were younger. Now that my oldest is in middle school, I find the Easy Lunchbox containers easier. They hold a bit more food and are easier to clean 🙂 My oldest is quite happy to have his standby favorites most days, with some seasonal variation in fruits. He now prepares his own lunch most days. My youngest loves variety, and also likes to buy lunch at school. I agree that having them bring whatever they don’t eat home is helpful in several ways. You get a chance to see what they actually eat, and they can snack on things that they may not have had time to finish. Time is an important factor to consider when planning portions 🙂
The YumBox containers are some work to clean. I’ll keep the Easy Lunchbox containers in mind when my kids grow out of them.
Thanks for sharing how you make lunch packing simple. I’m excited for when my kids take over this task!
The Easy Lunchbox containers are copied after the Ziploc ones that were discontinued for a few years. Ziploc is now remaking them. They’re leakproof whereas the Easy Lunchbox brand ones are not. We’ve been using the Ziploc ones for about 7 years and swear by them.