MONITOR:THE SURVEY MAY have been crude, but the results were no less disturbing. I asked my son about his friends' lunch boxes. Top of the list seemed to be crisps, followed by some sort of chocolate. Sandwiches crept in behind, sliced white, with anything from jam to peanut butter to ham.
Processed foods surround us in a frightening way. Their ease, convenience and increasing claims to be good for us, or at least not bad for us, makes the task of selection hard. Making food for later consumption isn’t anything new – think of cheese, jam and chutney – but transfer the activity out of the kitchen and into a factory, and everything changes.
The modern cocktail of chemicals used to keep colour, increase shelf life, provide taste and texture, runs to hundreds if not thousands of permutations.
For all the cookbooks and television shows devoted to food, the contents of our children’s lunch boxes have changed dramatically over the past 40 years, but hardly at all over the past 10. Where a hunk of soda bread and some leftover ham may have been partnered with farmhouse butter and a pint of that morning’s milk, we now have sliced pan, processed ham, factory-made butter with added salt for flavour, and a sweet drink.
What are we feeding them? I know we are all busy, and there is so little time, but with a bit more encouragement, effort and thought, it is easy to boost our children’s dietary health.
Nutritionists argue for a balanced diet, and there is sense in that. Yet the challenge is not so much in balance as in the quality that goes into making that up. Returning from holidays to the rush of term-time, I have just got around to registering vague thoughts of discomfort as I find myself reaching for the tried-and-tested formula for stocking the family’s out-of-home eating.
Organisation is required, so I have devised a simple route to Christmas. There are now 14 weeks to go, taking half-term into account. That is about 70 lunch-box meals. Here’s a revolving three-meal programme that is designed to provide variety and choice without too much demand on the cook.
Lunch one can be based on a pasta-based salad with lots of vegetables, occasionally chicken, and sometimes pesto sauce (see last week’s column for a guide to home-made pesto making). Lunch Two involves stir-fried rice with vegetables and egg. This occasionally has chicken, prawns or beef added to it, depending on which is to hand. Lunch Three can be built around a potato-based salad using olive oil and lemon juice instead of mayonnaise. Every so often couscous or quinoa might provide the starch base, usually in partnership with yoghurt and mint or coriander.
It may sound like extra work, but it can become a workable formula in no time – with plenty of nutritional foods, flavour and choice.
harnold@irishtimes.com