What Are Your Kids Eating for Lunch?

You may know what's on the handy, little printable menu on your school's website from month to month, but unless you go there and see it and taste it - what do you know about the quality of the food being served to your child?

Is it possible that your child is eating a lunch that looks like the lunches eaten by the intrepid teacher @ - Fed Up: The School Lunch Project - swathed in plastic and cardboard packaging, loaded with fat, preservatives, additives, dyes, high fructose corn syrup, and possibly still frozen or not cooked/reheated correctly or safely? Is your child at risk for early-onset diabetes? Or maybe developing food allergies due to the excess gluten, peanut oil, trans fats, etc. offered in these questionable school lunches?

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You can start at home by packing healthy, waste-free lunches for your kids. Try something new like the speedy bento lunches made by Biggie at Lunch in a Box or just buy a new lunchbox that your kids get excited about taking to school. Laptop Lunchboxes are a great, colorful way to excite your kids about the healthy things you're putting in their lunches. If you don't live in southern California, but you'd like to try bento at home, check out J-Box or J-List for fun bento boxes and bento supplies (disclaimer: I'm an affiliate) that can be shipped anywhere in the contiguous US.

Check out more amazing Laptop Lunches (like the one at left) made by blogger Jennifer Shmoo over at Vegan Lunch Box.

Or visit the Laptop Lunches Flickr Pool for more Laptop Lunch-packing inspiration.

These lunchboxes are rather infamously known as 'un-Lunchables', but I think it's for good reason. DO YOU KNOW WHAT GOES INTO THOSE LUNCHABLES BY OSCAR MEYER?!?! :o Neither fit for man nor beast. ;) Deli meats loaded with preservatives, fatty cheese, candy bars, Wonka Nerds, Juice boxes, sodium-laden tomato sauces and mustards, fatty mayonaises...UGH! :p

Traditional bento boxes are being packed in non-traditional ways with non-traditional foods in the U.S. every day. Try your hand at one or check out the HAPPY and FRESH Bento Flickr Pool to see more lunches (like the one at right) and get inspired to pack beautiful, healthy lunches for your kids and yourself!

A new addition to the waste-free lunch market is the new(er) Goodbyn - a slightly over-engineered lunchbox that compartmentalizes kids lunches, entertains with stickers and silly faces, but takes up a good bit of room and has no space for freezer packs. It will hold a whole banana so a child's entire lunch won't stink of banana by lunchtime, but I think this one could use just a little tweaking. The Laptop Lunch system doesn't come with a lunch bag, but at least you can order one made specifically for it that will accomodate a freezer pack to keep things cool until lunch time. ;) The Goodbyn on the other hand - is BIG. Like fill-a-whole-backpack-big. :o

Everyday, I thank my lucky stars that it's possible for me to cyberschool Spawn. I can make him healthy lunches from scratch everyday and keep a close eye on his diet and development. I'm so blessed. =D

I ♥ cyberschooling!

Chrissi, Cyber School Mom