Visit a school cafeteria just once and you’ll recognize that your parents were right all those years ago – we could feed half the world’s children with the food we waste daily and decrease our landfill space at the same time. Lunching with our kindergartener a few years ago proved eye-opening. Thankfully, a friend had invited us to go with her and her son the previous spring, which prepared me slightly for my first official lunchroom visit. Still, I marveled at the ease in which my then 5-year-old procured his milk and then plopped down next to me, Batman bag in hand, for his lunch with 130 other kids.
For my first couple of kindergarten visits, he sat with a nice mix of girls and boys from his class. By Halloween, they were fully segregated – girls on one end, boys on the other – which doubled the boisterous laughter, rowdy behavior and belching potential from one end of the table. Since education now fixates on standards and testing and moving our children ahead academically in the fastest possible way, something fun had to go, especially on the elementary level. Recess breaks and lunchtime took the hit leaving just twenty minutes to cycle students through the cafeteria to eat.
Eating is clearly not the point of lunch, although they do nibble and pick. This didn’t bother me too much initially because he snacked mid-morning and again after school, but when his lunch bag returned home day after day with a sizable amount of lunch left in it, I became more observant on my visits. That day, as I looked around at all the plates and character lunch bags surrounding us at the end of the lunch “hour,” I realized our child wasn’t an isolated case. Regardless of whether they eat the corn dog hot lunch or bring in their own peanut butter and jelly sandwich, kids throw away an astonishing amount of food each afternoon.
If they were eating all that food, maybe the enormous piles of juice boxes and granola bar/chips/cookies/sandwich baggies and wrappers pitched into the trash would seem worth it somehow.
Or not.
Excessive lunch packaging and its landfill implications caught the attention of some environmentally-conscious California moms years before I noticed the problem. They organized a movement for packing waste-free lunches and challenged schools and parents to decrease the amount of lunchroom waste. Eventually they formed a website – www.wastefreelunches.org – and created a company in 2002 dedicated to providing “waste-free lunch kits” for schools, cities, solid waste agencies and other organizations.
As it turns out, packing the right amount of an environmentally friendly lunch is not that difficult. But first, I needed to jump off my parental high horse and recognize reality – the food pyramid is overrated. Here’s what we started doing instead:
- Instead of sending in a “super-sized” well-balanced meal each day, I slashed my food amounts and stopped worrying about him starving all afternoon.
- I ditched the large portions of apple slices and grapes which had returned repeatedly in their plastic containers.
- We went to half sandwiches in Tupperware’s reusable sandwich holder.
- We started paying attention to how much he’s hungry for and how we package it, reusing plastic baby food containers for pretzels.
- Fruit became an after school snack instead of a daily battle over “why didn’t you eat your apple today?”
These measures won’t solve all of your lunch challenges. You’ll be amazed at how your child can like one thing one day and completely disdain it the next week. But try to give choices – what days your child wants hot lunch and what to put in the cold lunches you prepare. After all, your child is the one learning how to make wise eating decisions.
Submitted by SpMoms contributor Julie Kaiser.
