5 tips for making a school lunch your kid will eat

From kindergarten through fifth grade, the average American child may eat more than 1,000 school lunches, and for the average adult, the packing struggle can be quite real. Work demands, personal care and other caregiving commitments can all limit aspirations of becoming a lunch aesthete. With simple planning and preparation, parents can streamline the often frustrating process on busy mornings.

Begin with a list. Start by making a cheat sheet divided into the five categories of school lunch. I follow my grandmother’s rhyme: “Vegetable, fruit, main and crunch. Add a treat for healthy lunch.” Populate those categories with foods your child loves, and this will become your shopping list. Not only does this eliminate morning guesswork, but it also creates a deep and reliable bench of options. Have fun with new frontiers of lunch food fusion: celery, strawberries, a pizzadilla and cheddar bunnies, or cucumbers, blackberries, meatballs and crackers.

Organize your kitchen like a chef. Prepping your ingredients may seem like an extra step, but it saves time and effort. Caroline Flynn, a chef in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., insists on organization to lower the fluster of cooking. “When you’re making lunch for kids, you have to have the sensation of a mise en place, ‘everything in its place,’” she said. Chop vegetables, wash and dry fruits, preportion snacks and place them in appropriate containers to stay fresh. Designating an area of your pantry or cabinets for nonperishable lunch items reduces movement and allows you to monitor stocking needs at a single glance.

Enlist your kids as sous-chefs. Assembling lunch the night before is a champion move. It works great for cold foods and drinks — especially water bottles with insulation worthy of a space shuttle. Have your children help so they can see and taste what they are getting the next day. If you do this while cooking dinner, reserve some of the night’s meal for lunch, and it technically won’t count as leftovers.

Freeze some of the lunch. “A lot of people don’t think about using their freezer,” said Lindsay Livingston, a dietitian in Westerville, Ohio. If your child prefers hot food like pasta or rice in a thermos, divide the cooked grains (undercooked by a minute or two to preserve texture) into a muffin tin lined with plastic wrap. Freeze, remove and re-store in a sealed bag or container. Reheat individual molds in the morning by microwaving for 90 seconds on full power, adding a tablespoon of water per serving.

Add a token of love. If cooking can be viewed as an expression of love, is packing lunch included? Consider Asian obento culture, where families balance flavor, texture and color to make edible (and easier-than-you-think) creations like octopus sausage, apple bunnies and onigiri rice balls in the shape of pandas. Some may view this as overly competitive and impractical, but it can also be a method of communicating love, health and joy.