School Lunches on Autopilot

Next week is spring break for our kids. We're staying in town and haven't planned much, but I'm as excited as if we were going to Hawaii for the week. Because I have five whole days off from making lunches.

Every morning as I pull out the lunchboxes I am reminded of what Dorothy Parker reportedly said whenever her telephone rang: “What fresh hell is this?” Some weeks I’m on a health kick, making sandwiches on high fiber high protein bread spread with soynut butter accompanied by fresh fruit, low-fat pretzels, and fruit juice. Other weeks it’s the path of least resistance: plain pasta with olive oil in a thermos, gummies (at least it says fruit on the wrapper) and a couple of Girl Scout cookies, alongside some chocolate milk. Whatever. I'll make them eat a banana when they get home.

In the morning I spend a lot of time crossing from refrigerator to pantry to microwave, stopping in the middle of the kitchen to think, sighing, trying to remember which girl likes pretzels and which one likes dried apricots, and then resuming the circuit. As a person who now packs an average of 40 lunches a month, I am awed that my mom found a simple formula and stuck with it, for three kids, for at least ten years.

The school lunches of my childhood were an object of envy, and not because they were gourmet. When you’re nine years old, the last thing in the world you want is a lunch that is different from every else’s, emitting garlicky odors or displaying shiny textures or unusual colors. In short: if you would pay top dollar to eat a particular dish at a top rated restaurant specializing in ethnic cuisine as an adult, it may as well be plutonium when it show up in a lunch box.  That’s why the lunches carried by the Davis kids were so darn right. They didn’t try to be anything but what we were: bland and middle class.

A sandwich, either peanut butter and jelly, peanut butter and butter, peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff (catching a trend yet?) or the cheese sandwiches that my siblings and I used to tease my mom about, as she unwrapped the bright orange squares from their individual cellophane wrappers. “Mmmmm, American Processed Cheese Food Product,” we’d say, reading the cheese packaging label aloud and careful to stay just out of swatting distance. “My favorite!”

A single serving size bag of Fritos nestled alongside the wax paper-wrapped sandwiches. My mouth still waters at the memory of their fatty, salty, corn goodness pressing rectangular tracks onto my tongue, as I savored them in the cacophony of the Council Rock Elementary School cafeteria. 

Next into the paper lunch sack went a Hostess Ho-Ho, which is where my siblings and I exerted some individuality. My oldest sister always ate hers like it was corn on the cob, slowing rotating it and nibbling through the hard chocolate exterior then the cakey layer, until she got to the vanilla cream inside. My brother, disconcertingly referred to as "Little Larry" even after he'd topped 6 feet, could put one away in a single gulp. And I liked to break little bits of mine off and pop them in my mouth, examining the strata of the rolled pastry cake as I went.

At the bottom of the lunch sack was the shiny New York state Macintosh apple. That went straight into the garbage.

I don’t recall envying anyone’s lunch, or ever trading parts of mine away. There was no room for improvement as far as I was concerned, and I never complained about monotony. Who’s stupid enough to complain about a Hostess Ho-Ho?

Don't bother telling me that my kids are old enough to make their own lunches; you know it, they know it, and I know it. But it's not a hill I'm willing to die on. The fact is that the mornings they make their own lunches are filled with trauma and tears and they end up packing a 100% starch meal, whereas if I pack the lunch the trauma and tears are at least accompanied by 50% protein and fiber. It's simple math.

Frankly, if I was clever enough to come up with a lunch formula that would last for a decade, as my mother did, I wouldn’t care if resembled the food pyramid or a food pyre. It would be enough to have the whole process on autopilot.