Green Options

The kind folks at Citizenpip have offered to give a Square Meal Kit to one lucky Eco Child’s Play reader!  The Square Meal Kit features:

• 1 insulated lunch bag with nametag and carabiner that easily attaches to a backpack
• 1 stainless steel water bottle
• 4 BPA-free airtight food containers
• 5 100% cotton napkins

“Citizenpip is muck-free: no lead, BPA, PVC, or phthalates.”

To enter, simply leave [...]

Here in Los Angeles kids go back to school just after the Labor Day weekend. I’m finishing up the shopping for school supplies and clothes. Shopping for lunchbox items has been a little more complicated. It’s no secret that I’m a big Tupperware fan but Tupperware doesn’t fulfill every need in this house.

The good folks at Enviro Products sent over a stainless steel food container. I was a bit skeptical at first, because my son is the only one who packs a lunch and sometimes these things are too difficult to unlatch. It turns out I had no reason to worry, the latches are firm but easy enough for an elementary school boy to maneuver and there’s no metallic taste. It’s a large container, and I’d love to see one that’s sandwich sized, because that would keep the sandwiches from flailing around and falling apart. It’s perfect for pastas grains and fruits. My kids seldom want soft skin fruits like peaches or nectarines in their lunch boxes because they’re ruined (smashed) by lunchtime.

Every wonder how the mystery fish sticks or tater tots ended up in your school’s lunch program:  think politics, think lobbyists.  $10 billion is spent each year on the National School Lunch Program, which is renewed every five years. According to the USDA:

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is the Nation’s second largest food and nutrition assistance program. In 2007, it operated in over 95,000 public and nonprofit private schools (grades K-12) and provided low-cost or free lunches to over 30 million children daily.

Our kids take packed lunches daily.  We do this for a multitude of reasons… Celiac disease which mandates a gluten free diet, dairy allergies which means no milk or milk protein. For two of our children, we end up packing wheat free/dairy free/gluten free/vegan lunches. The other two get wheat and dairy but otherwise vegetarian lunches.

Another reason we pack lunches for all our kids is to ensure they eat healthier and so that I can see what they are actually eating on a day to day basis.  The leftovers come back home, so they can become snacks.

We do spend time brainstorming lunch ideas… the kids never complain but I get bored of packing the same foods over and over.

Our family uses waste free lunch systems (LunchSense and Laptop Lunches). We LOVE our lunch containers as much as we love the food inside!

Today, my 6 year old is off on a field trip to watch a play. The children have been instructed (through numerous notes and voice reminders) to bring a THROW AWAY LUNCH. This goes against every grain in my body (and mind). I was a parent chaperone for the trip until it was canceled due to snow. On the original date, I showed up with both our lunches packed inside one lunch box. I figured the throw away bag didn’t pertain to the Mama who was keeping tabs on it.

(Photo by Rafal Fabrykiewicz at Dreamstime under RF-LL)

Since I couldn’t go today, I had to pack a toss away lunch. The teachers (and I understand) do not want to be responsible for 75 lunch boxes at a public park and on the bus (though they told our children that it was okay to bring a DS, hmmmm… go ahead and bring a $200 electronic, but don’t bring a lunch box).

How can you create a disposable lunch sans baggies (I’m-plastic-I-stay-in-the-landfill-for-10-lifetimes)? That is a challenge I’m still pondering as I sit here typing. Here’s the tips I’ve come up with so far. Please feel free to share your ideas!

Chalk this one up to bizarre products out there:  fake mold designed to protect your child from school lunch theives.  According to Wired:

Here’s a way to protect your kids from the school bully: Anti-theft lunch bags, adorned with artificial green splotches to make food look moldy. Just tell your kids not to eat lunch around their teacher, or you might be getting a visit from Child Protective Services.

A man who stabbed an Emu to death ‘because he wanted to eat it for Christmas lunch’ has been fined almost A$4,000 (US$2,500) for animal cruelty.

An Australian court heard that, two days before Christmas, Patrick James Andrews, 23, crept into the Emu enclosure at Alexandra zoo in south-east Queensland, where he repeatedly stabbed a 30-year-old Emu named Mary, before cutting its legs off. Zoo staff later found the animal dead in its enclosure.

So now that you have everything you need to send your child off to school with a greener lunch, what do you put into that eco friendly lunchbox?  There are cookbooks out there focusing entirely on kids lunches.  (Try Vegan Lunch Box.)  Or, you can come up with fun ideas on your own.  Here are a few suggestions and recipes to get you started…

Wraps- If you kids are getting tired of the same old sandwiches, try layering their favorite sandwich fillings onto a whole wheat tortilla.  Roll it up and cut into bite size pinwheels.

Soup- During the winter months heat soup and pour it into a thermos, don’t forget to include a spoon!

Remember the school lunches from back in the days of your youth?  Playing the guessing game was a daily occurrence.  Was that mound of goop macaroni and cheese?  Or maybe tater tot casserole?  You would think that by now things have changed in the lunchroom, but have they?

In public schools all over the United States children are at the mercy of the National School Lunch Program.  The NSLP was started back in 1946, with the purpose of providing affordable nutritious meals to kids.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful that this program provides lunches to children no matter what their family’s financial situation is, but the quality of the food being served is very questionable.  (In the 1980’s the Reagan Administration declared ketchup a vegetable for use in school lunches.)  According to a 1993 survey, the USDA found the nutritional quality of most school lunches to be mediocre at best.  In this day and age, with childhood obesity at an all time high, and overly processed foods being the norm, is “mediocre” good enough for our children?

One of my favorite parts of elementary school was lunchtime. I always looked forward to my sack lunch.  My friends and I would compare our goodies and trade, as well as feel sorry the kids stuck with an overcooked, bland, awful school lunches.  Of course, I didn’t have a cool organic lunch tote, but I had one of those retro metal boxes, I think it was Scooby Doo.  Families today have more choices then we did in the Seventies, especially when it comes to eco-friendly lunches.

Print*Pattern*Paper offers many unique eco-friendly products from recycled stationary to totes. I especially like the Lunch Pack.  The Lunch Pack comes with a darling organic cotton sac, a matching organic cotton napkin, a bamboo plate, and bamboo utensils. The bamboo utensils are really cool, as I have never seen them before, but the spoon is rather shallow causing my four-year-old son to spill lots of yogurt with it.  The whole set makes a nice presentation, and for endurance sake, the bamboo plate and utensils may be better suited for dramatic food play.  The organic napkin and lunch sac are very hardy though.

This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy (see proformagreen.com). John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.

Debco now offers a number of lunchtime totes made from at least 25% recycled content. These bags demonstrate the growing trend to make practical, green items available to marketers.

And with the slowing economy I would remind Ecopreneurists that there is likely a much wider audience for these bags as more and more folks are bringing lunch to the office both for economic (it is cheaper than eating out) and health (bringing in healthy foods and avoiding fast foods) reasons.

Simple non woven insulated lunch coolers like the Debco Bag #NW4517 are EQP $3.04 with a one color imprint. The Debco Bag #NW6915 (a square shape designed) are EQP $3.42.  Available in black, red, lime green and royal blue, the bag we seem to be having the most success with is the Debco Bag #NW4694 non woven 100 gram polypropylene insulated cooler pictured to the right. All these bags are made from 25% recycled material, and Debco lists them as biodegradable on the Debco website.