Gen X Journey

The kids are back at school today (well they are if they live in Queensland). So mums all over the place have put together healthy and nutritious lunchboxes for their kids to impress the the teachers and get a great shot at oneupmanship over the other mums.  Oh and their kids get healthy food too.

Actually in my vast experience in schools there are four general types of lunches for kids. Sometimes they overlap with each other, but most time the consistent four win out over the year.

1. The gourmet lunchbox filled with asparagus quiche made with wholemeal pastry, organic asparagus and lactose free milk, a . bowl of raspberries, etc, etc. Each of the food groups is covered. All food is in recyclable containers with name labels on the lids.  Mothers of the owners of these lunchboxes tend to become very irate when matching containers mysteriously go missing, spending a large amount of their time searching through lost property while all the time suspecting that someone really stole it. The owners of these lunchboxes spend a large amount of their time swapping out bits of quiche for fruit straps that reside in the lunchboxes of the third type.
2. The well-intentioned lunchbox.  On the first day it is filled with chicken sandwiches cut into the shape of stars that by the end of the week have evolved into vegemite sandwiches (with the crust left on). The plastic container of cut up oranges has been replaced with an apple.  It’s healthy, just not so pretty as the gourmet. Recyclable plastic containers have evolved into gladwrap and ziplock bags.
3. The supermarket convenience lunchbox.This type of lunchbox usually is made up of dip a bic, tins of tuna (do you know how hard these are for kids to open), cheese sticks, mini packets of barbeque shapes, fruit straps and popper juice.  The presence of these items in the lunchbox depends on what they’ve been able to nag their parents into buying during the weekly shopping.
4. The bag and bottle lunch in a shopping bag.  This is usually a bottle of coke, perhaps red bull (sugar is energy–right?). Usually this is accompanied by a family sized bag of cheezels (cheese is healthy) or chips (potato?).  These children are usually the envy of every child in the playground until they see how their food inspired sugar high/crash makes their teacher cranky. Some days these kids have no lunch at all. 

But in all my time I’ve never seen a bento box like this one in the picture.  Now that’s a lunchbox.  Image