Packed lunches and the "food police"

HariboJunkie

caledoniaquine wrote: »

I told her their mummys probably cant cook and dont love them enough to make them homemade soup lol

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:eek: I hope your children don't repeat that in school.

I am lucky that my seven year olds are still at the stage of loving my homecooked food and I really enjoy doing it for them. They take HM soup with HM bread, HM yoghurt with honey, small fruit salad and some kind of home baked treat. I do think it's only a matter of time before they get teased and I hope I have brought them up well enough to handle it but I remember very well having the urine extracted out of me while my schoolfriends ate crisp sandwiches and a packet of spacers for their lunch and I had my cold cornish pasty and a whole raw carrot.

I am lucky as a SAHM to have the time to prepare their lunches from scratch though and I fully understand that not everyone has the time. As long as they are being provided with a healthy balanced diet and the parents can afford to buy quality ready made, it really doesn't matter whether it's home cooked or not IMHO.

rev229

The school my son goes to has a healthy eating policy, only fruit at break no chocolate, biscuits, or crisps at lunch. But the kids are still having them. My son doesn't have any thing like this in his lunch box he does have home made cake. He gets teased for taking milk in a lock and lock cup, he is 11 and only drinks milk, water or pure fruit juices. I have told him that he is saving the planet by not using cartons of juice etc. He refuses to take any value stuff because the kids might think we are poor, so it is fruit, home made cakes, and sandwiches. He took in some home made chicken nuggets today! Apparently you can't make nuggets and pizza yourself! They can only be bought in the supermarket! This is what one kid told him! Oh yes thats the kid who has crisps and chocolate! He doesn't realise he is eating value fruit or cakes made with value ingredients:rotfl: no complaints when the packageing is removed!

Heva2015

When I was a kid I wanted to be the kid with the home made stuff..my best friend's mum was a SAHM and she always got home made biccies, really yummy looking stuff and I usually got the butty and a can (when I was at high school).

System

When my son was at junior school, the headmistress would very often patrol the dinner tables at lunch time and make comments and send out letters to parents who she didnt think were providing a healthy enough lunch. It caused a right stink i can tell you!

It took me ages to persuade my son to take tuna mayonaise sandwiches for his lunch, all that persuading was ruined though when until one child in particular on the dinner table told him tuna was for babies and the rest of the kids laughed. That was a bit rich for a lad that only ever took lemon curd sandwiches!

moanymoany

This thread has made me think about my own school dinners back in the 1950's. Most children had school dinners and they were very expensive at five shillings a week - especially with more than one child. The meals were very traditional meat and two veg followed by a pudding. For most children they were the main meal of the day and tea was scones or bread and something when we got home.

At junior school where I went there were some children who were from really poor families. They often had no socks and wore old shoes with no laces and their clothes were dirty and their hair was obviously cut at home and they were thin. For them lunch was thinly spread jam on dry bread. No-one would have teased them (and I think it is teasing rather than bullying) as they stuck together.

I had my own problems with school dinner as the money was collected on Friday morning and my mother wasn't paid until the afternoon. It was a rare Friday that I had that five shillings. I was told to say I'd forgotten it, but the school must have known. For two years I had two of the vilest teaches that ever lived and they made my life hell because of this - even though they must have known the family circumstances. The secondary school had a Monday collection - made life so much easier.

I think there is too much fuss made over food and children. They should have much less choice at school. If parents give them rubbish in their lunchbox the chances are they feed them rubbish before and after school.

I think that part of the 'unhappy British child' syndrome is the excessive number of choices children are expected to make. My generation didn't have them and I didn't give them to my children. (In those countries where children are 'happier', the way food at home and school lunches are organised would seem very old fashioned.) They had a choice of this or that, something they could cope with. I didn't give them food they didn't like, but they didn't dictate what they would and wouldn't eat, they didn't expect to because they had never done it.

What does amaze me is when people think it is 'cruel' to make children go to bed early, to make them eat healthy food and to eat what they are given. The results of the 'cruelty' generally appear in the form of happy, healthy children who do better at school than their more 'fortunate' school mates.

Wow, got that of me chest!

thriftmonster

MrsE wrote: »

I'm amazed at the amount of posts on here who refer to other children saying the lunches are not the same as everyone else, ect as bullying.

Is that really seen as bullying nowadays?

Whatever happened to banter between kids?

Are kids not allowed to take the mick a little & tease each other anymore with it being bullying?

I don't have a problem with gentle comments - I do have a problem with my kids being told "your dinner looks like dogsh*t" - and that's one of the politer versions.

In update, since ds1 started secondary school he hasn't had a single issue - he was well chuffed one day when he had quiche and looked round and one friend was eating pasta salad, another cold pizza etc. Plus his new friends all know about his allergies so tend to accept anything odd as part of that.

Ds2 still gets comments - but they tend to be politer so he shrugs them off now - my kids aren't "sensitive little petals" - but to be told day in, day out that it looks like sh*t upset them a little.

Gigervamp

When I was at secondary school I only had school dinners for a short while because I'd become a vegetarian and my only option was a cheese salad.

When I went packed lunches I'd take soup or sandwiches and I always had a tupperware container of Jordans Crunchy cereal. We all used to call it fart seeds! The contents of my packed lunch always had my friends crowding round to see what I'd brought in.
A friend was also veggie, and we would sometimes swap lunches. It was because of that that I tried humous for the first time. She had it in her sandwiches and I loved it so much she gave me the recipe!

moanymoany

I understand how you feel thriftmonster, but I think that for children in junior school it is the nature of the beast.

I had an awful time at junior school, the children 'picked' on anyone who has something about them that is different. For me it was my family background. For the really poor kids it was their poverty, but they banded together.

My daughter also tells me that she didn't like junior school because other kids picked on her - and I think a lot of people feel the same. There seems to be a group of girls or boys who are the 'chosen' ones and the rest of us have to fix as we can.

There may be schools who foster an attitude of kindliness and sharing - but trying to stop other children cruelly teasing another puts the other child in the firing line as being - what we would have called a 'tell tale tit' - and in for more.

I tried to help my dd, by encouraging her to laugh - 'yeah, that's me etc.' - that makes it no fun. Maybe to have said - 'yeah, if tuna's baby food what's lemon curd?' and laugh would have got the other kids laughing at the other kid.

My dd often talks about how much this advice helped her to deal with the teasing. It is no fun teasing someone who just laughs at you and turns it back on you.

Difficult, but it isn't the food it's the difference from the majority.

culpepper

This reminds me of a book we had for the kids called 'Maurices mum'.
All about a mum who made her son healthy meals and wasn't a comformist to the mum uniform etc.
She makes a tea party and all the 'in kids' are invited.
all the food is homemade and tastes lovely,then after tea, she takes them into the kitchen to look at the labels on the food containers.
Fried flies,jelly worms,snail sauce etc LOL
Anyway my point is, it is often the packaging on food that kids are impressed by(some are so gullible) so a couple of little tupperware type pots with interesting names on might make the difference between trendy and bogus.
My son only ever had school dinner once, he lost his lunch box that day(it was stolen) ,he had a piece of pizza and some fish fingers like the other children,no veg,no fruit, nothing and I was asked to pay for it.

mummysaver

I think we are quite lucky that the schools here that my four attend do have healthy eating policies, and they are by far from being the only ones who take in homemade food, though admittedly not everyone has quite so much hm stuff usually!

I know my dd2 can be funny about what she takes in, she is a very strong character and so are her close friends, and I think they are their own food police! She gave me endless grief about the value crisps I buy, but the value ones have no additives I explained, and since they were a treat she didn't have to take them! She soon got over it and I bumped into her bf's mum in the shop not long after our conversation, she was buying the value plain crisps as her dd had insisted on them as they had no additives lol!

dd2 doesn't seem to care about hm stuff, just anything that is packaged! Lucky that she rarely gets anything packaged, I'm far too mean to buy it, four kids and packed lunches every day would be far to expensive if I didn't make it!

dd2 latest fad is coloured bread! Her teacher this year has a cow if the kids drop crumbs, so she figured if her bread was coloured she would be able to recognise her crumbs and wouldn't get the blame unfairly, so we've had pink, red, green and blue bread this term! Wouldn't recommend blue, and it looks really weird toasted!

Today's lunches, just in case anyone is interested were:

cheese sarnies in hm red bread
melon balls (frozen from when Mr S had melons at 40p)
hm yoghurt with strawberry jam in a separate pot so they can stir it in themselves (well dd's took these, ds says yoghurt is too much faff)
hm lemon drizzle cake
apple
pack of value crisps
drink of water