I’m a leader in the Udi’s gluten free community and my most recent question is about healthy snacks back to school. What healthy foods did you eat when you went back to school as a kid? What were your favorite school lunch snacks?
I’m super bitter about my sack lunches as a kid. My mom made homemade bread once a week for sandwich bread, (cry me a river) and we canned peach and apricot jam all summer long from our orchard bounty (I thought it was terrible at the time). The sweetest snack I got was a banana for dessert and for some reason, in the 80′s at my elementary school, bananas were considered a throwaway food. Top that all off with the huge brown grocery bags we used once in a while as lunch sacks (no, the really big ones. folded over 7 times) and I’ve got some therapy to do.
Now that the tables are turned, I sound like my mother. I’m always harping about healthy snacks for back to school. Ding dongs weren’t on the menu at my house when I was little and they aren’t on the menu for my kids. Wonder Bread?
Fugghetaboutit.
Talk to me about what you ate as a kid, what you prepare for your kids (if you’re a parent), and even tell me what was considered a throwaway food at your elementary school.
I’m crying for you Argentina.
Allison
I'm Allison, founder and editor of Petit Elefant. I run the gamut from granola to glamour and love everything in between. I think the beach is always a good idea, as is Diet Dr. Pepper; on ice. Sometimes I put out the fires and sometimes I start them. Sometimes I really do have it all together. Sometimes my children say otherwise. We just like to keep it real around here.
Let me tell you something: tomorrow I will have been married for fifteen years; in all that time I’ve only purchased wheat bread, and my kids have NEVER eaten sandwiches, which makes lunches overly complicated over here. Somehow, this summer, white bread made its way into my home, and now? MY KIDS WILL EAT SANDWICHES, HALLELUJAH. I sacrifice on the altar of Buying White Bread to make things easier.
Also, my kids have been slurping these applesauce packets. Squeeeeeeeez!
When I was little, snacks were mostly fruit, dried fruit, or saltines w/homemade salsa. Sometimes homemade bread or cookies. For my littles, it’s fruit or crackers or sometimes home baked treats. 2 favorites: pretzels with nutella and sliced apples with peanut butter & granola.
I hated bolognie sandwiches! Yuck even worse with cheese singles. Can you tell that I grew up white trash. My children do get a cookie or fruit roll up, but the get a fruit of their choice and yogurt.
When I was in elementary school, I don’t really remember kids throwing food away unless it was TRULY detestable– like, say, a salad. But sandwiches were frequently traded around. I grew up in Colorado, where we eat a lot of granola and yogurt and whole-wheat bread. The REALLY good stuff for me was LEFTOVERS… that is, if I liked what we had for dinner the night before!
The worst sandwich I had was imitation crab meat in second grade. It was unrefrigerated and disgusting. I also got lots of bologna sandwiches. Yuck. My poor husband gets pb and j most days b/c the decent lunch meat is so expensive.
1984. Fourth grade. My mom would make pesto and provolone sandwiches, which pretty much made me the most uncool kid in the class. Something green and smelly and kindof warm? Ick. Now of course I adore pesto but back in the day? Not so much.
My kiddo gets fruit, yogurt covered pretzels, fruit leather, cereal and nuts for snacks.
I actually loved cucumber, carrots and snow peas in my lunches as a kid, and NOTHING was better than fruit. My mom was gracious though; she’d pop in some cookies every once in a while. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that! I actually ate really healthfully as a child now that I look back on it, especially for how poor we were and compared to what the other kids were eating. I eat even more healthfully now and I think I owe that in great part to my mom. Good habits start young.
I remember waiting in line in the cafeteria to .15 for a carton of milk and on Fridays there was chocolate milk! The lunches my mom packed for me were pretty standard: sandwich or soup, fruit and a cookie., but every once in a while she would write me a note on napkin and tuck it in my bad. I’d read it secretly, embarrassed and happy at the same time. I can’t wait to put one of those notes in my daughter’s lunch bag.
My four year old absolutely loves when I fix a “snack kebab” using either toothpicks or wooden skewers. She thinks it is super fancy. I’ve made just about every variety-fruit, cheese, veggie, sandwich meat, chicken fingers, you name it. I’ve even made banana “popsicles”-half a banana on a skewer, in freezer overnight, coat banana with a thin layer of peanut butter and role in crushed peanuts. Yummy!
My mother would pack me tortellini with a home made sauce in a thermos about once a week and it was so good I did not give a good gosh darn that I was teased mercilessly for having something that was not a sandwich or a Lunchable. My little one likes when I put pot stickers in a thermos and pack some ponzu in a little container. I don’t do this often because she usually comes home smelling like ponzu because she spilled it on herself. I pack her fruit squeezy things, trail mix, fruit leathers, or Zbars for her afternoon snack. She never eats the nuts in her trailmix, just the dried fruit, but I keep packing it anyway. Another big favorite with lunch is cucumbers drenched in vinegar with a little garlic powder. She calls them “cucumbers-that-make-you-go-thhhhhpt”.