{boycotting the school lunch}

I'm not sure what prompted me to write this blog in the middle of the school year. Maybe coming across a blog or two with what I think are totally failed packed lunches. Maybe it was a pic I just came across on my phone that I took of an after school, pre-evening activity snacks for the kids. I have always been disgruntled with the "hot" lunch program at my kid's elementary school. They boast that the lunches fall within the guidelines for the USDA standards based on the Food Pyramid. The Food Pyramid is a big crock of bull, it is totally upside down. Those of you that follow my blog, know how I eat (mostly Paleo Diet) and who follow this kind of diet, too, get it. I used to follow the Food Pyramid when I didn't know any better. When doing so I never saw the results I wanted to in the gym. Who knows, maybe it played a roll in me getting cancer. Your results in the gym are 80% of what you put into your body. When we joined CrossFit we started following The Zone Diet a ratio of carb:protein:fat in the following percentages 40/30/30. However, we soon realized that you could "Zone" anything. Bread, pasta, beans, beer, tree bark, worms, etc. Anything! We started doing our own research and reading and we began to realize than none of the above are good for you. That is when we started to mostly follow a Paleo diet. I say "mostly" because we eat this way about 80-85% of the time. That allowed 15-20% per week for social gatherings, nights out with friends and just plain busy as a family of five. It is hard to be perfect all the time unless I devoted every waking hour to cooking and food prep and if you have been reading my blog you know I'm not that girl.

Wow, sorry about that. This blog is about packing healthy lunches. I have always had a problem with the school lunches, but I kind of found myself at a loss and overwhelmed by family chaos, being busy with three kids and not knowing what to put in a healthy lunch for my kids. I don't like convenience food items that are empty calories and totally void of any nutritional value, such as, granola bars, breakfast bars, Cheez-its, chips, etc. I couldn't figure out what to put in a cold lunch that my kids would want to eat or what to pack so they would have variety from day to day. So this year I committed to making their cold lunches, most of the time. For K we go through her lunch menu for the month and let her pick when she wants for hot lunch. I'm okay with letting her do this because she really doesn't like hot lunch and rarely chooses it. She always chooses Thursday because one of their choices is Pizza Hut pizza and it is a treat. Other than that there are only a handful of things that she will eat at school. She knows that she isn't allowed to choose hot dogs, corn dogs, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pork or ham and cheese hoagies or chicken salad sandwiches (all on white bread) Sorry, that isn't a "hot" lunch and it is just downright nasty. No chicken nuggets that are mechanically separated and then squished back together in the form of a "nugget". My kids have really learned this year what we find acceptable for food and are pretty good at making good food choices. Of course, they are still kids and want some garbage, too. Especially, T. He would live on hot dogs and cinnamon rolls if he was allowed. However, I was totally thrilled the other day when we went to Costco and I knew he was going to want a hotdog from the food court and it was going to be a fight and him not winning. But, you know what he picked? He wanted a rotisserie chicken with broccoli and cauliflower with it. Two points for mom drilling good food choices into his head. We feel a little bit better about A eating hot lunch at the Jr. High. They have more choices and again, she is good at making good food choices. We try to limit her gluten, which we do as a family anyways, because it tends to upset her stomach. So she can put together a pretty good lunch. I would rather pack her a lunch, but it is also a social thing for her. She likes to go through the line with her friends. I get that. I try to squeeze a cold lunch in for her every now and then and send healthy snacks for her in between classes. We pack a lot of on-the-go snacks and meals, too, and we try to keep those about 99% healthy, as well. Every now and then I do grab Zbars and other comparable things. Probably not a good choice, but we are human, too. It is hard to stop somewhere and pick up a quality snack so you need to be prepared for snacks for hungry kids and mom, too, when you leave the house.

I spent a lot of time before school started this year brainstorming for good lunch item choices. We needed good proteins, healthy fats, veggies and fruit. I made a list for each category and we went from there. I followed blogs for "Bento box" lunches by other moms. There were many! Moms who have WAY to much time on their hands creating amazing little lunch creations like this mom at Another Lunch. She made me feel a little inadequate at first. If I packed a sandwich it was going to be your basic square cut into two triangles. Not cut into the shape of a heart. If I threw grapes in my kid's lunch they weren't going to have cute little food picks of little girl heads sitting on them so they looked like a cute little body and I'm not going to paint little faces on little cubes of cheese with food coloring. I do love looking at all her creations and wished I had four extra hours in my day to create something like that. Though, if I had four extra hours in my day it wouldn't be spend creating cute little lunches. I would be sewing or taking a hot bath. Both sound like wonderful ways to spend four new hours in my day. So, instead of feeling inadequate about my lack of desire to create lunch art I just tried to find some healthy food choices on her blog and many other mom lunch blogs. I have to say, I didn't find a whole lot of inspiration. What I found were a lot of carbs, processed snacks and sugar of all kinds tucked into lunches everyday. In one lunch I saw pretzels, goldfish crackers, chocolate chips, some fruit and cheese, a sandwich and TWO Nutrigrain cereal bars, because her son gets hungry in the afternoon and needs a snack. Well, DUH, you totally carbed him up for the day and set him up for a crash and needing food come about two o'clock. How is that little boy's brain supposed to learn at his full potential at school with that kind of lunch? It was on this blog that I posted a comment. I said, "I see a lot of carbs in the lunches, but not a lot of protein and no healthy fats. What protein and fat choices do you include in your lunches? Btw, I love looking at all your creative, fun lunches." She deleted my comment. I didn't feel I was attacking, just curious and hoped to raise a little flag for the sake of kid's lunches everywhere. lol Here are some other lunches I recently stumbled back upon. I came across them quite while ago and was equally as horrified then. Please do not try this at home. I love that people are packing homemade lunches. It saves money and is better than McDonald's or Burger King. Well, they should be. Tell me what you see. What I see are a lot of carbs, white bread, white tortillas, desserts, etc. What I don't see is a lot of protein, fruit or veggies (sometimes none!) and healthy fats. Yikes. It just hurts my stomach.

We, as a society, need to start thinking about our food as fuel because that is what it is. It is fuel for our machine. We only get one body in this life, take care of it! Many people take better care of their cars than they do their bodies! Start reading nutrition labels and ingredients. Can you pronounce them? Most of them, probably not. Is it made by nature or in a lab? I read this quote in a magazine once regarding butter vs. margarine. "I trust cows more than I trust scientists." Amen! So much of the crap in our food is just man made substances, chemicals. What will that do over time? I truly believe what it will do over time is exactly what we see in society today. Heart disease, obesity, diabetes, autism, cancer, etc. I just read somewhere that it takes cancer 20-30 years to become detectable. It takes it that long to fully grow to where it can be seen in some way, shape or form. I have no idea if that is true, but it makes you think. Twenty to thirty years ago I ate what my parents bought, filled the pantry with and cooked. Macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, ramen noodles, hamburger helper, casseroles with cream of mushroom soup, etc. What can you do in the "meantime" while cancer becomes vile enough to threaten your health? Can we reverse it? Can we keep it at bay? I hope so. I think so and I think a lot of it is in our food choices and how we choose to live. This is just my opinion and this is my blog so I get to voice my opinion freely. :) You can't deny that you are what you eat. If you eat crap, well, your body is going to be crap. The sad thing is so many people have eaten this "crap" for so long it has become their normal. It is a hard habit to break (wow, that brought back memories of junior high school dances sitting on the bleachers while everybody else danced. lol), but one so worth breaking.

Holy cow, another tangent! Sorry back to packed lunches....

The other day I snapped a picture of snacks that I packed for my kids for after school with an evening of cheer and wrestling practice ahead of them. I was so pleased with what they were going to be eating I had to document it. lol

Protein: Leftover rotisserie chicken and a hard boiled egg

Carbs: Clementine orange and grape tomatoes or steamed cauliflower and broccoli

Fats: Almonds, pecans or walnuts depending on the kid

That, my friends, is what I think a snack for a kid (or adult) should look like. But, that is my opinion and hopefully the opinion of many others. With this in their bodies I feel like they were fueled enough to have a great cheer and wrestling practice and come home to a good dinner to top off their night.

Here are a couple pics of lunches I packed for the kids early in the year. We have a little white board on our fridge for cold lunch orders. The night before I try really hard to remember to write down what they want in their lunches. If I'm really ambitious I will pack up what I can the night before (I don't cut apples or make sandwiches the night before) and then when I get up I can just check the list and finish up the lunch. I don't have to ask the kids what they want in the middle of the morning chaos. Chaos doesn't even begin to describe our mornings. Ugh. I live for random days throughout the year when there is no school. And then by the end of the day with three kids at home I pray that summer vacation will take it's time getting here!

Lunch for A: Broccoli and carrots, chicken and spinach meatballs, gluten-free pretzels, almonds, oranges
Lunch for K: Carrots, apples, cucumbers, tuna with a tiny bit of mayo and chopped pickles, gluten-free pretzels and pecans.

A couple of weeks into the school year a classmate of K's asked her, "Why do you always bring healthy lunches?" First of all, I find that sad that a healthy lunch is questioned. Second, I said, "Tell them because your mom loves you." :)

Here is a list of items I have written down for lunch ideas. Just some ideas if you happen to want some. I keep this list in the inside of a cupboard door and we add to it as we find things that we would feel okay packing in a lunch. We try to limit grains in lunches and dairy to an extent. We do include some gluten-free items from time to time. They aren't my first choice, but I guess they are better than choosing a typical product, such as gluten-free pretzels vs. regular...maybe. Even though they are gluten-free the ingredients with gluten are replaced with other grains. Not cool.

• Protein: High quality deli meat, cheese, meat sticks from US Wellness Meats, tuna, hard-boiled eggs, chicken & spinach meatballs, meat and cheese rolls (wrap a piece of cheese up in a piece of deli meat and slice...like...sushi...I guess.)
• Fruits (that our crew likes): Nectarines, peaches, apples, oranges, grapefruit, plums, grapes, berries
• Veggies (again, that our crew likes): red peppers, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, carrots, cucumbers, spinach or romaine salad
• Nuts: Almonds, pecans, walnuts
• Misc: Gluten-free pretzels, GF Multigrain chips, GF crackers, preservative-free salad dressings, cream cheese for celery or K likes to dip her pretzels in it.

I love the divided containters we use. I wish they weren't plastic, but I can't find anything glass like this and it would just be scary sending glass to school with the kids. I get these containers at Easy Lunchboxes online. They sell lunchboxes also that are pretty inexpensive and the containers fit perfectly in them. I recommend spending the money on them. We had lunch boxes at home that I thought would do. They didn't fit well at all in any of them.

If you have any other ideas for lunch items please post them in the comments. Eat happy! :)