MotherSoup

There’s one thing you can say for Thursdays: there’s no more packed lunches to be made for the week.

I hate doing lunches. I loathed doing them for myself at high school and I dislike doing them still. I’m sure the school dinners are excellent, but money is tight, and as I can produce lunches for a lot less than £1.50 a pop, the household’s contract goes to me.

Earlier this year we all got a handy little leaflet about making school packed lunches fun healthier and easier, but alas few of the well-meant tips were of new ideas in the Soup household, so I remain, bleary-eyed in the early hours, shoving foodstuffs into little bags and plastic boxes.

I don’t think my lunches are paragons of virtuous eating, but I do have some standards, and they don’t make life rather easier. I was rather impressed to realise that I share some of my kiddie-lunch rules with no less than Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: no chocolate bars like Mars or Twix, not even the fun-size ones. No fizzy drinks. No crisps. Chocolate is permitted in other forms which avoid (as Hugh puts it) “child targeted brand bullying” and all forms of home-baking are encouraged. There will always be a fruit and, if possible, a salad item as well.

I’m rather surprised and disappointed to find that while Hugh talks elsewhere about ethical choices, and about the effect of western food companies’ greed and its effect on the developing world; he then talks of eating Kit-Kats, produced by Nestle, the target of the world’s largest ethical boycott. So - Kit-kats are out for us, as are Blue-ribands, Breakaways and anything in the Milky-Bar range.

Mind you, my kids are rather less likely to accept goats’ cheese and cold pasta salad than his, and I imagine that his kids are less likely to get white bread (sometimes!), mini yoghurts (supermarkets’ own, not big brands, and definitely not N***** ones) and the various occasional cook-from-frozen treats I might slip in once in a while.

It’s surprising how many ‘non-crisps’ are in practice no better than the crisps they are touted to replace. Mini-Cheddars have more calories than Hula Hoops! I’d rather have the Hula Hoops - who wouldn’t?

So, now I have four free days to seek new inspirations for quick, cheap, popular lunch items. Roll-on the day they invent the self-filling lunchbox… and price it within my ducks-bottom budget.