Packing Waste-Free Lunches
By Karina | September 12, 2011
I recently read this really interesting article in the NYTimes about schools that require kids to pack their lunches in reusable or compostable materials. Wow! I have no idea how prevalent this is - and the article doesn’t have much in hard facts - but it does have neat quotes like these:
In school years past, she said, many a morning came unhinged when the girls were sent to school with disposable sandwich bags.
“That’s when the kids have meltdowns, because they don’t want to be shamed at school,” Ms. Corbett said. “It’s a big deal.”
“The kids are all about it,” Mr. Greene said, but with the parents, “you have to build habits.”
Like I said - I’m not sure how popular waste free lunch programs are, but it’s interesting that the schools are relying on peer pressure to get kids to make their parents do the green thing.
We have talked bunches before about how to pack a waste free lunch. It’s something that I struggle with, and I find it easier to avoid disposable products by simply not keeping them in the house. This means I have to use the resources I have on-hand.
Of course, this post by Jesse Knadler at Rurally Screwed really cracked me up - she said something we’ve talked about here in much more hilarious terms:
I thought I had it bad with the mad canning disease until I met a woman, a fellow handmade type of gal who also preserves like a deranged homesteader, who proudly declared she no longer uses plastic of any kind but packs her lunch each day into canning jars.
Naturally, I burst out laughing.
The image of this wholesome and conscientious woman lugging 47 pounds of glass loaded with crackers, tuna fish and brownies to the office each day was too much. What does she carry it in? A wagon?
It’s partly hilarious for me because I have been packing jars in to work myself - I bring extra tea in a jar, yogurt in a jar, cereal in a jar. It’s easy to carry thing that need to be measured in a jar, because many of them are marked with units (and all of them are a known volume). And the most attractive thing about the jars to me is that they actually SEAL. most of the mish mosh of plastic containers I have don’t seal at all, so they introduce an unfortunate game of chance into my daily commute, especially when I’m packing everything into my motorcycle top box.
But! it’s true. the glass jars are heavy - super heavy - and bulky! - and I don’t think they’d be what a kid would like to bring as part of a waste-free packed lunch.
Do you pack a waste free lunch? Does your kids school require it?
[[Photo from flickr user mazarines via creative commons license.]]
Topics: Food, Waste | 2 Comments »
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Our elementary school doesn’t require it…yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was strongly encouraged. We’re out in Portland, OR, and most kids that bring lunch have reusable sacks or boxes.
We also send our daughter with locally handmade sandwich and snack bags from Simply Practical. A few of her little friends have started buying from this site, also. I love love love their fabrics and they quality is amazing. I either wipe them out at night or throw them in the washing machine, super easy as a busy mom. Can’t recommend them enough.
And, I actually love the idea of packing my lunch in canning jars; I’m a bike commuter, and many days I cross my fingers that my lunch hasn’t spilled all over the inside of my bag and my computer!
I am an environmental educator. At my center, we have a contest with all of the visiting to classes to see which class can pack the least amount of trash.
Of course, we don’t count the recyclables and compostables - they get dealt with seperately.
We weigh the rash and then graph the resuslts on a huge dry erase board so that lunch becomes a mini-math lesson AND a lesson in reduce, reuse, recycle. In fact, WHILE the kids eat, we play Jack Johnson’s version of the old School House Rocks “The 3 Rs” and the students have laminted copies of the song if they’d like to sing along (most do).
It is rare that a class has NO TRASH, but it does happen.
The students and teachers REALLY get in to the contest. Some of the cafeterias try to help out, too. But, unfortunately, the lunches that the schools provide frequently have the most trash (40% of our studetns are on free&reduced).