For those of you paying attention, you’ll already know I’m a dad of two girls. One is nearly 15, the other 10. We get along brilliantly but life is not without its little potholes for any of us. Thankfully, ours are relatively small in the big scheme of things but one of the things I promised myself I would address this year was their diet. Not that it was horrendous - in fact it was, and is, reasonably healthy. It just happens to be littered with some “added extras” if you know what I mean. If we’re being honest here, “high calorie added extras”. The type that normally have a sexy wrapper around them late at night… or maybe come in a box of six with a 20 minute lifespan once opened.
So I figured it was about time I fixed it - after all, it’s my bloody fault.
First port of call - the school lunchbox. Here’s a sample school lunchbox from me from last year. It got overhauled then too but maybe not enough:
Fruit juice. Carton of. Natural as possible. Vary between orange, apple and pineapple.
Crackers - trying to avoid bread as much as possible due to lots of bread at other parts of the day.
Chicken. Sometimes processed/sometimes fresh. Good source of protein.
Cucumber. Sliced. Add to chicken. Sandwich between crackers. Presto.
Cereal bar. They look healthy on the box but I probably should read it a bit closer. Those fuckers are great at tricking you.
Sometimes, a packet of crisps. Not every day… just sometimes.
Fruit always comes home uneaten so I stopped even bothering. Variants on this lunchbox are available but this is mostly it.
So A) as you’ll see it’s reasonably healthy but B) it’s boring as hell.
So tonight, I thought I’d take up the challenge to get it right this year and I hit the web in search of some clever ideas that maybe other grown-ups like me had contributed to the world.
Ha. Ha.
OK - so I’ll do it myself. I’m not stupid, I can figure this out in an hour or so, and I did. But on the road to enlightenment, I also came across this:
http://www.kidspackedlunch.co.uk/our_service.html
Read it. If you’ve got kids, read it twice. In what possible world could anybody live in that you can’t spare ten fucking minutes to make your child some freaking lunch?
I quote:
“We are busy mums of young children and, like all parents, we know how important it is that our children eat healthily and how difficult it can be to find the time to prepare fresh and varied lunches every day.”
Well, you know what, I’m a busy Dad. I run two international magazines, blog twice a day, every day (somewhere), I have the same chores that everybody else does, pets, cars blah blah blah, but I would never, ever not be able to find the time to make my kids something to eat, or hear what they have to say.
Half of these people probably need to find the time to feed a dog in the morning. They can also probably find 30 minutes to cock about on their Blackberry. This is a sad state of affairs.
Anyway, I was going to drop the nice people an email and tell them what I thought but they won’t read it because they are all too busy. Hey - here’s a thought. If you didn’t try to babysit other parents who are too rich to make their own kids a lunchbox, you’d have lots of time to make your own kids something wouldn’t you.
Sorry. Sometimes people just really fuck me off with their self-righteous money-making schemes that are dressed up as concern for others.