Book Review : Lunch Lessons

I’ll admit it: I suck at making myself a lunch, and breakfast for that matter. I have a bad habit of getting up too late to eat or make myself a lunch, and then usually end up going out to lunch to grab something to eat after starving all morning. It’s a vicious cycle, one that I’m hoping to change through good daily habits, which have yet to begin. Insert Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children (Collins Living, 2006).

I’ve recently discovered the wonders of bento-style lunches, catching on here in America as laptop lunches. These lunches are cute multi-serving/course lunches in a compartment-based lunchbox. This type of lunch allows for a variety of foods in the same meal, insinuating that lunches will be healthier this way! One of my fave blogs, Natural Family Living Blog by Tiffany, recently posted about Lunch Lessons and laptop lunches, and I was intrigued. Amazingly, my local library had the book on the shelf, so I zipped over there and picked it up, and devoured it in a single Sunday afternoon.

The book takes the reader through the typical American school lunch from a cafeteria, and highlights the policies and legislation that have made it this way. Let’s face it, what comes out of the cafeterias of most schools wouldn’t pass Michael Pollan’s definition of food: less than 5 ingredients, something your grandmother would have eaten, and nothing processed.

I asked Chris about his cafeteria as a public school elementary student (I didn’t have the same experience) and was surprised when he said the food wasn’t all that bad …then he added, “Well, on second thought…I guess tater tots aren’t all that good for you, but they sure were the bomb. Perogis too. MMmmmm.”

The winds of change are blowing, and as the book walks through some of the missteps of the federal lunch program over the years, the reader is introduced to people trying to make a difference, one school and district at a time. The good news is that they are succeeding.

Have you ever seen SuperSize Me by Morgan Spurlock (watch it free at SnagFilms.com)? The one part that sticks out in my mind is when he compares and contrasts two schools and their cafeterias/kids' lunches. A typical rowdy public school cafeteria is shown with a child buying chips and a soda for lunch, which given what the staff was serving as “food” that day... may have been a better choice. Spurlock then shows a mellow cafeteria in which the students were provided with healthy organic food and everyone was raving at the kids’ behavior – given the fact these were the “at risk” kids, the disparity was drawn.

This book reminds me of that scene in SuperSize me, in book form. It’s kinda like that.

Finally there is a slough of recipes in the back of the book, most of which look divine. I can’t wait to try some of them, perhaps this weekend, but I will certainly follow up and let you know how they are if I do end up cooking soon.

I enjoyed this book, and although not exactly what I expected (I was expecting more bento-box style information), the book was a good read and I would recommend it, especially to folks with kids.

Grade: A-