School Lunch Solutions
by Angela Brown from the Educational Wellness Series

• Pack Healthy Lunches. Get your child in the habit of eating healthy munchies for lunch. Pack apples, mini carrots, bananas, applesauce, grapes and other healthy snacks. Read the labels and keep kids off high calorie / high fat foods. Avoid quick sugar snacks (cookies, donuts, pudding, candy etc.) that will spike your child’s sugar levels and then leave them feeling cranky.

• Pack lunches with protein. Protein is brain food and can be found in meats, eggs, protein drinks and protein bars.

• Keep lunches cold. When packing cooked meats such as turkey, ham, chicken, or anything with mayonnaise, salad dressing, it needs to be refrigerated.

• Get an Insulated Lunch Box. Insulated lunch boxes are sold now in all of the super stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Kmart/Sears, JCPenny etc. Thety keep lunches cold longer than a regular paper bags. Frozen gel packs can be added to insulated lunch boxes to keep lunches cold longer. If you are using a paper lunch sack, double bag the frozen gel packs so they don't melt as quickly.

• Pack non or slow perishables. Non-refrigerated foods that make good lunch additions include whole fruits and veggies such as apples, carrots, bananas, grapes, individually packaged cheese sticks, breads, crackers, canned meat lunch packs, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pickles, muffins and bagels.

• Send Microwave Lunches. Lots of schools have microwaves that allow for kids to heat up their own lunches. If your child’s school offers microwaves, you can’t beat the frozen dinners now available in the grocery stores that are portioned  with the various food groups, and counted for calories, and fat grams. They make awesome lunches and many are quite tasty.

• Leftovers for Lunch. Both Ziploc and Rubbermaid offer sandwich size plastic containers that leftovers can be packed in. They are made in 2.5 cup, 3 cup, 4 cup and 5 cup sizes. The 2.5 is a good size for anybody’s lunch and some even have separators so food doesn’t touch when heated. (*These are the kind my husband takes to work for his lunch.)
  
  * I streamline my cooking by cooking one day per week. I make several meals at once and then pack them away in mini-meal sizes. During the remainder of the week we all eat them for business and school lunches, and for dinner when only one or two people are home rather than cooking up a big meal.
   

• Sanitize everything. Before you prepare food of any kind, wash your work area (cutting board, counter top, table) with a bacterial soap. Wash your hands with soap and water, and wash your cutting utensils, knives, silverware and dishes. Wash your food before you prepare it, to rinse off sprays and chemicals used for preservation.
  
  
• Keep family pets away from food preparation areas.
  


• In the lunch box you can send your child antibacterial hand sanitizer now sold in all drugstores, discount stores and grocery stores. They come in small travel size containers and as individually wrapped hand wipes.

• Recycle. Recycle plastic containers, plastic jugs, paper, cans, and cardboard packaging by tossing it in the recycle bin. Juice containers and cans should be rinsed out so they don’t attract bugs, ants or bumble bees.

• Recycling for Reuse. Lots of food comes packaged in plastic containers that can easily be recycled for reuse such as yogurt containers with a snap lid. But keep in mind bacteria build up and contamination when recycling for reuse. Make sure you clean reusable containers with soap and hot water before reusing.
  


• Certain things should not be recycled such as plastic drinking straws. Straws are fairly cheap (275 ct for $1.00 at the dollar store) and you can’t sanitize a straw or kill all the bacteria in one for a third of a penny. Zipper bags and sandwich bags shouldn’t be reused if they've ever been used for meat (either raw or cooked.)