Have you packed that first school lunch yet? Many schools now require a waste-free lunch. At bynature.ca we carry a variety of reusable supplies you can choose to replace the throwaway lunch bags and make your child’s lunch waste-free.

Reusable Lunch Bags & Boxes

Start with the bag or lunch box itself.

Replace paper bags with a bento box for cut up lunch in the tidy little boxes of the Laptop Lunches Bento System or freeform lunch of any shape in a colorful Mimi the Sardine bag?

Reusable Sandwich Containers

Next, containers for the food. If you chose the Bento Box already, congratulations! You already have the box and the containers.

Replace baggies with Planet Wise Sandwich Bag with a window or put the sandwich in a stainless steel Lunchbot Uno.

Reusable Water Bottle

Then, the drink.

Replace a juice box or a canned drink with a stainless steel Klean Kanteen or a glass, flip-top bottle from Lifefactory?

Reusable Utensils

Finally, what utensils will your child use?

Replace plastic utensils with lightweight, reusable bamboo To-Go Ware or just send finger foods.

More on School Lunch and School Supplies

• Eco-friendly School Supplies
• Fun School Lunch Surprises
• 5-minute Lunch Box
• Trends in Schools: Waste-free Lunch
• How Does Waste-free Lunch Add Up?

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Every year we circle back around to reducing waste as our children go back to school. Waste from school lunch is visible and preventable, so we keep coming back to improve and come closer to that ideal of waste-free school lunch.

This year, look at your child’s school lunch bag to ask if anything is being thrown away. If it is, what reusable alternative can you find?

Take one step. You don’t need to look for perfection. Just look for this year’s baby step.

The Lunch Bag or Box

A single-use paper or plastic bag guarantees that your child will have a 100% NON-reusable school lunch. If you haven’t decided on a reusable lunch bag or box yet, start there.

Which lunch bag or box to choose depends on a child’s age. We have some adorable lunch bags that might be too cute for cautious older children, but we also have a variety of plain containers that won’t give anything away.

Dabbawalla Lunch Bags

Younger children will love Dabbawalla Lunch Bags because of the cute and bright designs, such as animal faces. These bags are insulated to keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold. Best of all, they are fully machine washable. You will still need to pack the food in containers inside the bag, though.

Goodbyn Lunch Boxes

With Goodbyn Lunch Boxes, the lunch box is also the food container. There is no need to have separate small container to include just enough of each food—and you won’t find yourself asking, “Where is your sandwich bag?” or “What happened to the glass container with the apples?” Your child won’t accidentally throw away your new, reusable containers. This lunch box simplifies lunch.

GreenSmart Lunch Bags

For an older child, the GreenSmart lunch bag is plain enough, but still stylish and easy to carry. The neoprene (or neogreene) material is insulating and machine washable. Just zip food containers into the two separate compartments.

The Food Containers

If you already have the lunch bag or box, work on food containers as your next step. Zippered sandwich bags are very easy to use.

An important step to reducing lunch waste is reducing portion size. Only include just enough fruit or crackers. Having small containers, each with a surprise snack can make lunch fun for kids. I like the Kinderville Little Bites Jars for small (3.5oz) portions.

The Lunch Accessories

Once you have the reusable food containers taken care of, make sure that utensils and napkins are reusable as well. At lot of lunches are just finger foods that don’t require utensils, but this can change as our children get older. We have stainless steel children’s cutlery and bamboo utensils (including chopsticks) in their own travel pack. We also have children’s napkins, but you might be just as happy including utensils and napkins from your family set—or from a secondary family set. Make sure to sit down and discuss what needs to come back in the lunch box, though, so your family set doesn’t shrink over time.

This year, just evaluate your child’s lunch and decide one step you can take to reduce waste.

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Back to school again, and many parents are considering what to do about lunch. If you need a reason to make this the year that you switch to reusable lunch boxes, reduction of solid waste should be reason enough.

Reduce Solid Waste from School Lunch

If every elementary age child in Canada were to use reusable lunch boxes, we could prevent 185.6 million pounds* of waste. That’s about 67lbs per child per school year, which is about the weight of the average child in grade 3. If it’s difficult to wrap your mind around what 92,795 tons means, think of it as 7,000-24,000 African elephants, depending on their size. It’s a lot of waste, and it goes into landfill unnecessarily.

That waste includes both packaging waste and food waste.

• To reduce packaging waste, don’t buy prepared foods. Prepare your own foods in reusable containers. Provide reusable napkins and utensils.
• To reduce food waste, pack smaller portions of foods your child likes, and vary the food so it doesn’t get boring.

There is another very important change that schools can make to reduce food waste. Put recess before lunch. School plate waste studies show a dramatic reduction in food and drink waste when children play before they eat.

*185,590,000 = 67lbs per child per year x 2.77 million elementary age children in Canada.

Image © Anke Van Wyk | Dreamstime.com

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Now that you have a waste-free lunch box, what will you put in it? Keep your child interested in a healthy lunch with monster sandwiches and smiling, pink-cheeked rice balls.

Happy Faces & Funny Monsters

When we see a smiling face, we smile. We see that with babies all of the time. When your child is away from you, you can still have a similar effect with happy food. When she opens up her lunch box and sees a happy salad or rice ball with a big toothy grin, she is likely to smile. You can add cut-out veggie shapes or even use food paints to create the faces.

A funny monster sandwich or a Mr. Fruit Head dessert will be the talk of the lunch room. A kid with a monster in his lunch box will definitely want to show and tell.

The Element of Surprise

Food can be a way to communicate with your child when you are separated. The more experience you have putting together fun school lunches, the more your own personalities will come into play. I like to get a laugh from my children by giving them something unexpected. I use the element of surprise.

Animals. Little animals lurking in the lunch box can be great fun. To make an octopus hot dog—an octodog—you can cut eight legs into one end of a hot dog up to about an inch and a half from the other end. Strawberry mice make a great dessert crawling through the lunch box. If you child develops a favorite, this could become a character in an ongoing story. The octopus could venture through salad one week and rice the next.

Shape. Different shapes can be a surprise. Collect cookie cutters in big shapes for sandwiches, medium sizes for rice, or small sizes for vegetables. A carrot that looks like a garden of a dozen flowers is fun to eat.

Color. Painting an old favorite a new color can be fun. We sometimes add beets to potato salad to get a shocking pink salad. Beet juice, turmeric, spinach, and even squid ink are great foods to add color by painting bread, dyeing rice, or drawing faces.

Switcharoo. Using unusual ingredients to create familiar shapes can surprise a child—the first time. A banana dog with peanut butter, banana, honey, and fruit relish on a whole wheat bun is a healthy lunch that looks familiar and tastes sweet.

The Inspired Food Artist

If you are feeling really ambitious, look at amazing photos of Japanese children’s lunches for inspiration. The everyday gorgeous lunches from Anna the Red’s Bento Factory also give me a lot of fun new lunch ideas.

Put the Children in Charge

Sometimes my husband and I still make lunches for our children when they have a day out, but they are getting old enough that we ask them to be in charge a lot of the time.

If a child makes his own lunch, I have found that he is more likely to not only eat it but like it. Once my daughter was in charge of her own lunches, she stopped having sandwiches (Daddy’s choice) and random pub lunch (Mama’s choice), and she began making pasta salads with different ingredients each day. Her own tastes and personality showed through more in her lunches, and she ate her lunch every day.

Especially if your child brings food home or says she doesn’t like what you gave her, it helps to encourage her to be responsible for her own food. Fun lunch ideas don’t have to be about surprising her. You could use the same ideas to have fun making the lunch together.

Extra Treats

No, not sweets but notes, drawings, or a joke a day. One of my friends has included a note in his son’s lunch box every school day for that past eight years. They have a box of great keepsakes, and his son and all of his friends look forward to seeing what dad has said or drawn each day.

Food, including a fun school lunch, can one of the ways we connect with our children as they find their own way into the world.

Image © Mark Butler | Dreamstime.com

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If you are preparing to pack a reusable lunch box because your child’s school requires waste-free lunch boxes or just because a litterless lunch is the responsible thing to do, you need to know the range of your options. At the Kids’ division of bynature.ca we’ve stocked up reusable school lunch products for you.

Reusable Lunch Boxes and Bags

Systems

Laptop Lunches

Laptop Lunches is a bento box system that comes with a 90-page user guide. So many parents are using this system, that they have uploaded 8,600+ photos of bento box lunches to a Flickr group. Includes four reusable containers with lids, stainless steel fork and spoon, and a reusable water bottle.

Goodbyn Lunch Box

This cute, two-piece lunch box fits into a backpack or can be carried by the handle. Easy to open even for young children. Food is separated into compartments without separate containers. Includes a drink bottle. Just wash the whole lunch box at the end of the day. Comes with a bunch of stickers to encourage a child to customize—these include food allergy stickers. You know they are going to put stickers all over it anyway!

To-Go Ware 2-tier tiffin

The To-Go Ware tiffin is a lunch box system from India. This reusable lunch box can carry cold or hot food. You can use just one tier for a snack or both tiers for a full meal. Easy to carry by the handle or put in a backpack.

Boxes and Bags

SoYoung Mother Lunch Box

SoYoung Mother lunch boxes are linen outside with an insulated inner lining. An extra pocket on the outside can carry a napkin, flatware, or notes to the teacher. Carry by the handle or messenger style with a long strap.

Dabbawalla Lunch Bag

The Dabbawalla lunch bag is made from a neoprene-like fabric that is machine washable. The fabric is insulated, so it helps maintain food temperature. The fabric has earned the rigorous Oeko-Tex 100 standard of safety in textiles, an ecological certification process that tests for over 100 harmful substances.

Mimi the Sardine Lunchbugs and Lunch Sacks

It’s the great prints that attract children and parents to Mimi the Sardine. Their lunch bags come in two sizes: Lunch Bugs for younger children and Lunch Sacks for older children and adults. The Bugs have zippered closures and soft handles, while the Sacks have a fold-over Velcro closure and a heavy-duty handle. Both can be wiped clean or machine washed and tumbled dry on low.

Reusable Snack Bags and Sandwich Bags

Kanga Sac Reusable Snack Bags

Kanga Sac reusable bags come in two sizes: sandwich bags are 7″ x 7″ and snack bags are 7″ x 4″. Zipper closure is easy to use for any child. Washable alternative to plastic baggies.

Itzy Ritzy Reusable Snack Bags

Itzy Ritzy bags have great cotton prints on the outside with a waterproof coated polyester on the inside. FDA-approved as food safe. 7″ x 7″ for sandwiches.

Reusable Drink Bottles

Kids’ SIGG bottles

SIGG child-sized aluminum bottles are the easy way to carry a drink for one meal. They all have the new ecoCare lining and flip-style lids.

Klean Kanteen reusable drink bottle

For a child who drinks more during the day, a Klean Kanteen water bottle will be more appropriate. Comes in 18oz, 27oz, and 40oz sizes. You can also buy a sports cap separately.

Accessories

Fabkins

Reusable napkins come in several colors with designs that kids love.

Stainless Steel Straws

If your child doesn’t want to drink straight from a water bottle, you can still avoid tossing away plastic straws after every drink. Try stainless steel straws. Come in two lengths: long straws are 9.5″ and short straws are 6.95″. Washable, reusable, and keeps plastic out of your child’s mouth.

Resources

• Waste-free Lunch – Guide for reducing lunch waste both on a personal and on a school-wide scale. Includes research and success stories.
• Green My Lunchbox Campaign – Manufacturers of litterless lunch products offer a discount. Their goal is to encourage 15,000 families to commit to packing waste-free lunches in order to eliminate an estimated 1 million pounds of waste from landfill.

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Watching children scrap perfectly good food off a tray into a garbage bin is alarming. On Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, the piles of wasted food and half-used packaging—even unopened, packaged food—hauled away after school lunch was the most shocking part of a very shocking series. School lunch waste is preventable, but it requires changing thinking and changing habits.

Waste-free Lunches estimates that

a school-age child using a disposable lunch generates 67 pounds of waste per school year. That equates to 18,760 pounds of lunch waste for just one average-size elementary school

It costs schools money to haul waste, so waste-free lunch initiatives aren’t necessarily about environmental impact. Schools are looking for any way to reduce all waste. Trash cans full of wasted food and thrown away plastic containers are just one of the big sources of school waste. Whatever the motivation, waste-free lunch is a trend that is easy to welcome.

Does Your School Have Guidelines?

School waste-reduction programs that work have advocates in the schools. If you want to start a program for your child’s school, be prepared to get involved. If you have support from the school district or the provincial or state office of education, that’s a big help. But, the real work of shifting awareness and changing habits will happen day to day in the schools.

When one school in New York City participated in a Department of Sanitation waste prevention assessment, they found that each person generates ½ pound of waste per day. That would bump the Waste-free Lunch numbers up to 90 pounds of waste per school year per person. So, New York City provides simple guidelines and refers back to Waste-free Lunch.

Most waste reduction programs start with simple guidelines and build from there.

One California school conducted a pilot program in one classroom, giving each of the 30 students a reusable lunch kit then measuring success of the program. All parents used the kits and most agreed that they would continue to use them.

A very successful program can lead to a completely different approach to children and food at school. The Rethinking School Lunch guide from the Center for Ecoliteracy considers health, experience, food cycles, and more then incorporates all of it into the curriculum. Children don’t just fuel up at lunch time but they participate in food systems. Implementing this kind of program would take considerable commitment, but it helps to see the range of the possible.

Waste-free Lunch shares success stories, including a couple from Canada and the UK. When you read about the range of what people have tried and the ways they have succeeded, it is inspiring. Don’t be surprised if you come away with ideas to change school lunch at your child’s school.

Reusable Lunch Packaging

The idea of a reusable lunch box or bag isn’t new, though it may be unusual to the children who will be carrying them. Once we take that step, it’s easy to make the rest of the lunch packaging reusable as well. My family packs lunches in reusable glass containers with snap tops. The weight of these can add up for a young child, but I like that we can use the same containers to store leftovers and for lunches. They still take up space and add weight on the way home, though. What works for a young child?

The innovation that catches my eye is also a new twist on an old idea: reusable snack bags and sandwich wrappers. So obvious, and so brilliant! The best versions of these don’t use any plastics at all but just zip the food into heavy canvas or wrap a sandwich in a cotton cloth.

Again and again, the old ideas become the new trends.

Next week I will go into more detail about all of the great reusable lunch products you can find at the Kids’ division of bynature.ca.

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The problem that astonishes me the most—and slaps me in the face through experience— is what happens to a child’s attention when they drink liquid candy. I can see that a child jacked-up on sugar will not be able to pay as much attention to their learning. For some children—for my children— sugar and the other ingredients in soda send them into a temporary state of buzzing from thing to thing, distracted and unable to retain information let alone engage a subject and their own natural curiosity. That’s just the surface. There is a lot more going on when children drink soda.

The Issues

Among the issues that come up in arguments against children’s excessive consumption of soft drinks are:

• intake high calorie, calories empty of nutrition
• replace nutritious calories, including, according to AAP. the calcium that comes from milk consumption (though there are many other sources of calcium in a well-balanced diet than cow’s milk)
• not replacing but just adding on calories, which has made soda consumption a major risk factor in obesity
• intake of refined sugar and other processed food-like substances
• intake of substances not naturally occurring in the foods that your body has evolved to process
• overload the body with too much to process, which for some can mean Type-2 (formerly called adult-onset) diabetes
• intake of caffeine with jitteriness and increased heart rate similar to that adults experience
• the diuretic effect of caffeine, which can lead to dehydration
• risk of heart disease
• development of dental caries and enamel erosion (AAP)
• intake of high-fructose corn syrup
• intake of artificial sweeteners

The American Beverage Association counters each of these points (and why wouldn’t they) with a series of eye-rollingly unlikely scenarios that would actually build a child’s health through the consumption of soft drinks. Rather than accepting and accommodating excuses, why not just start over with the nutritious foods and drinks we know our children need?

The Problems with Soda in School

Among the problems with soda in schools are the nutrition issues (taking in the bad and replacing the good), the attention issues (setting up a physiological reality that does not prepare children to learn), and the commercialization and brand experimentation issues (that gives over their consumption habits and brand loyalty for life). These are not small or simple issues, and those fighting to keep soda in schools work hard through lobbying and public relations to convince us that everything is just fine.

The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement on “Soft Drinks in Schools” in which they specifically addressed vending contracts and nutrition policies. Not surprisingly, national soft drink associations have disputed the policy from pediatricians in the past five and a half years since the statement was released. AAP reaffirmed this policy earlier this year, so the pediatricians have not backed down. See the full statement for details and recommendations.

Contracts with school districts for exclusive soft drink rights encourage consumption directly and indirectly. School officials and parents need to become well informed about the health implications of vended drinks in school before making a decision about student access to them. A clearly defined, district-wide policy that restricts the sale of soft drinks will safeguard against health problems as a result of overconsumption.

One of the most often used arguments against removing soda vending machines from schools is funding. How will schools survive without vending machine contracts, we’re asked. Soda is a cop out for school funding, a short-term gain that creates several short-term and long-term problems. Though removing the crutch of soda can create short-term funding issues, the long-term gains in putting funding back were it belongs are worth the change.

The problems and the solutions seem clear enough. The arguments in favor of leaving vending machines in schools fail to persuade most. Implementation of solutions, however, is slow.

Bans on Soda in Schools

Health effects of soda are similar for adults and children, but efforts to curb soda drinking have focused on children, specifically on children in schools since these somewhat closed environments have been the locations of the aggressive marketing campaigns to capture a brand-loyal (and substance addicted) audience while they are young and vulnerable.

Bans and limitations of soda in schools are well underway over the past decade. Policies have come about through industry initiatives, medical association pressure, legislative and regulatory moves at every level of government, school board or school district policy, and decisions made in individual schools.

Bipartisan efforts on the federal level in the U.S. to either ban junk food and soda (1999) or even just issue guidelines (2004) have met with bipartisan defeat. So, the regulation of junk foods and sweet drinks has gone more local as school-by-school and now state-by-state guidelines and laws are put in place to limit children’s consumption of these empty and even (destructive) food-like substances. In every case, those who support a ban are up against heavily funded lobbying by the manufacturers of those junk food-substitutes.

The two most influential actions in recent efforts to ban sodas in schools have been the AAP statement in 2004 and the compromises worked out by the Alliance for a Healthier Generation in 2006.

In Canada, the soft drink industry itself (Refreshments Canada) pulled out of schools in 2004 following the AAP statement. That is, they pulled out of some schools—elementary and junior high schools.

The Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a partnership between the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation, pinpointed soda in schools as a major risk factor for obesity, and they set out to make a change. The Alliance, major soft drink producers, and the American Beverage Association created “School Beverage Guidelines” and a program to educate school children about those guidelines. The Alliance and their co-leader California Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger have continued to push this agenda for the past three years. Though limitations on soda sales in schools were welcomed by children’s health activists, for many this compromise with the soda producers themselves didn’t go far enough in ensuring that children eat only nutritious foods in schools. Some have even claimed that there has been no change in soda consumption with removal of sodas from schools. The full results aren’t in yet, though. The experiment is complete and the reporting has begun. Results will be available in 2010.

Now that sodas have been banned from many schools, it appears that the next step may be to tax sodas.

How to Help Your Children Understand Soda

Some of the news coverage of regulations and limits of soda in schools claims that these efforts don’t or won’t result in lower soda intake by children. You can stock your shelves with all of the right foods and drinks, but the people who will ultimately control what your children eat and drink while they are away from you are your children themselves. I’m not sure just calling soda liquid candy will be deterrent enough—that might actually work against your healthy goals.

If you want your children to drink less soda, explain why. Condition your children to make nutritious choices. Better yet, especially with younger children who might not understand a big “why not drink soda” discussion with abstract rules or requests, show them why.

In my family, we don’t have a hard rule against simple sugars or refined sugars. I know my children will make their own decisions, so I help them understand my reasons for wanting them to limit their own intake. When my son has overloaded on sugar and ended up emotional and bouncing around from thing to thing, he recognizes how much he dislikes the situation. He doesn’t like the feeling, so he chooses water given a choice of drinks. Until he forgets again. I do remind him, but the self-regulatory impulse is much stronger that the outside regulation by parents or school or government, so I encourage its development.

To help my kids understand what they were drinking in sodas, we experimented. We use Lawrence Hall of Science GEMS (Great Explorations in Math and Science) books. The year we studied chemistry, we used Secret Formulas (grade level 1-3) to explore sweetness of drinks. Cola is one of the secret formulas kids investigate in this book. Through taste tests and experimentation we reached the shocking realization that there are 17 teaspoons of sugar in every 20-ounce serving of soda. By that point, my children were just grossed out by sodas.

What Should You Do to Ensure Healthy Foods at School?

Just because there are school lunch limitations in place in your schools does not mean that these limitations reach snack foods that compete with school lunch, called within the industry “competitive foods.” You still need to be part of the solution at home and in your child’s school. If you expect that your child will eat nutritious foods, you will have to be vigilant and active in making that happen.

Resources:

• American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on School Health published a policy statement “Soft Drinks in Schools” on January 1, 2004. PEDIATRICS Vol. 113 No. 1 January 2004, pp. 152-154. They reaffirmed this policy May 5, 2009. PEDIATRICS Vol. 123 No. 5 May 2009, pp. 1421-1422.
• California Center for Public Health Advocacy, “Soda Fact Sheet,” September 2009. Clear, simple list of facts and numbers from medical journals.
• Michael F. Jacobsen, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks are Harming Americans’ Health, June 2005.

Image © David Gallaher | Dreamstime.com

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The key to making your quickie lunch preparation work is to keep ingredients on hand. Know what your child will eat. While you are pulling things together, keep a balance between proteins, fruits and vegetables, and grains.

Leftover Salad

• Start with rice or pasta
• Add protein: diced meat or beans
• Add cheese: squares, shredded, or feta chunks
• Add vegetables: diced zucchini, mushrooms, broccoli, avocado
• Add salad dressing (keep it vinegar and oil based if the lunch won’t be refrigerated)

Dips

• Savory: black beans, refried beans, guacamole, salsa, hummus, eggplant, spinach, cream cheese, pesto
• Sweet: yogurt, applesauce, cream cheese
• Dippers: fruit or cut vegetables, crackers, or tortilla chips
• Bonus for the 6-minute lunch: cut the fruits or veg or cheese into shapes

Spreads

• The dips above can be spreads as well.
• Spread on crackers or simple cookies, like vanilla wafers or graham crackers
• If the spread will soften the crackers or cookies, keep them separate and add a celery stick for spreading.

Fruit and veg

• Easiest: grapes, blueberries, orange slices (my son asked me to add that one)
• Half fruit cut: apple cut to show the 5-pointed star, kiwi. Colorful and interesting.
• Cut veggies: not just carrots and celery but broccoli, zucchini, and mushrooms
• No time to cut veggies for 4-minute lunch: peas in a pod

Sandwiches

• Use different bread
• Tortillas are very easy. Try peanut butter spirals: spread nearly to edge, roll up tightly, then cut into ½” slices. Spirals!

Trail mix

• Nuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, wasabi peas
• Raisins, craisins
• Chocolate chips

Slushy

• Frozen juice or frozen yogurt. Just keep a few in the freezer.

When you clear dinner, pack anything appropriate into small containers that you can easily put into a lunch box.

Especially if lunches aren’t refrigerated, be sure to add a frozen gel pack to keep food cool and out of the bacteria danger zone.

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If you are looking for ways to make healthy food irresistibly appealing to your children, make your own obento lunches with Laptop Lunches Obento Box System. (Look at over 7000 Laptop Lunches parents have made with this system.)

Parenting by Nature also has a variety of lunch boxes, bags, and drink containers for a waste-free school lunch.

Boxes and Bags

• Laptop Lunches Obento Box System – lunch box, containers, water bottle, flatware, and a book to help you get started
• LunchBots Stainless Lunch Containers – small stainless steel containers with lids
• Zippered Waterproof Bag – makes a great, simple lunch bag

Drink Containers

• Kleen Kanteen Stainless Sippy Cups – a toxin-free, non-leaching alternative to plastic
• SIGG Water Bottles, 0.3L Kids – a small version of the great SIGG bottles every adult wants

Drink Accessories

• Thirsty Totes bottle covers – a machine-washable cover that absorbs spills
• Stainless Steel Straws – no more throwaway straws
• SIGG Kidz Grip Handles – makes a SIGG bottle more kid friendly

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