Fall brings with it mixed emotions. On one hand I’m glad to see the fleet of bright yellow buses lazily meandering up and down the streets of town, but it’s usually short-lived—I start to miss the sound of screen doors slamming and even the constant barrage of questions, including “I’m hungry, what can we eat?”
Of course with the start of school comes the bagged lunch season. Kids can be fussy, but can you blame them? No one wants the same old same old, day in and day out.
Convenience and economics factor into lunch planning, but they often work against each other. Foods designed to make life easier, such as individual-serving prepackaged cookies and juice packs, can be expensive—and not necessarily healthy.
There are a few ways to get kids excited about lunches that don’t involve sugary, expensive treats. From Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, Scotian Gold offers bags of pre-sliced apples, which kids love. And Wilmar Acres, under the label Dominion Produce, sells bags of heirloom variety carrot sticks in a rainbow of colours, adding to the novelty appeal.
No doubt other regional farm operations also offer convenient snacks.
Having kids take part in lunch preparation can encourage them to enjoy the lunch process more. Baking cookies with them on the weekend makes things easier during the week.
Office lunches are easier—there are many more choices when fridges and microwaves are accessible.
Of course, Atlantic Canadians are not strangers to brown-bag lunches. An elderly neighbour who loved to tell stories to local children would fondly recall the one-room schoolhouse she attended from grades one through six. On particularly cold days Helen’s mother would place one boiled egg in each mitten of each child to keep hands warm on the long trek. The eggs were to be eaten at lunch, along with other assorted goodies tucked into the lunch buckets they carried.
Not all Helen’s childhood food memories were fond—her dad was a lobster fisherman on the Northumberland Strait, which meant that spring lunch pails would inevitably carry lobster sandwiches. Now you may have heard a variation of this story, and wondered if it was an urban myth: at one time lobster was considered food for the less affluent folks, and the other kids often made fun of them. In fact lobsters were so plentiful that they were often dropped onto farmer’s fields whole to be used as fertilizer—the supply far outweighed the demand.
Then there’s my sister-in-law, Margret Cornect, who immigrated to Nova Scotia from Holland in 1960 at the age of eight. “What I remember about lunches was the old jam jar filled with milk fresh from the cow. Mom put a little piece of wax paper under the lid to stop it from leaking. When lunchtime came around, it was horribly warm.
“Going by today’s regulations it’s a wonder none of us died. And all the ‘Canadian’ kids had cookies in their lunchbox. We weren’t allowed any—cookies were for Sunday only: two, after church, with a cup of coffee….”
Go ahead and treat yourself, whether it involves a cookie or two, a harvest salad or a comforting soup. And if the lunch is for someone else, a little, non-edible note never goes amiss.