School dinners v packed lunch

[F05ters1]

Reception age daughter begging to go on packed lunches already after 6 weeks of full time school.

Every day without fail when I ask her what was for lunch I get... fishfingers chips and beans, I didn't like the chips and I'm off beans so I ate the fish fingers. Please can I take a packed lunch?

pasta and cheese, I didn't like the cheese and the pasta was soggy so I just had the biscuit for pudding. when can I go on packed lunch?

mince and dumplings today, mince was too salty and the dumpling was soggy, please can I go on packed lunches?

blah blah takes a packed lunch. (dd has even approached said mum who said her dd was a picky eater 🙄)

why can't you just say I'm a picky eater mum!

For context she'll eat a salmon fillet at home but won't eat a fishfinger.
She'll eat fillet steak but not a burger.
She eats all veg and salad but isn't keen on meat. I make soup packed with lentils and do lots of eggy things for protein

I'm torn. school meals are free and I work shifts, it's been a godsend not having to worry about lunch for the four year old restaurant critic! but she is so adamant, should I relent?

I would consider them child friendly dinners as its easy to hide veg.

How about a compromise of only making packlunch on your days off rest? Or only days you work? If you make your own lunch then, if possible make her a replica of what you take. So she has the option of eating what you eat, or what the school makes.
Or give her a set amount of days a week. For example, every Tuesday and Thursday.

As someone who works in a school I would stick with the dinners. We always have lots of children in reception who eat very little for months and are extremely picky, those who’s parents continue to keep them on dinners always seem to eat a lot better as the year goes on. There’s one boy who literally ate nothing but a cracker every day for the first year, now in year 1 he’s clearing his plate every day. If children are hungry enough they will eat.

Our school food isn’t that bad a typical menu will be;

Chicken dinner with roast potatoes, carrots and broccoli.
Chicken curry with rice and naan
Burger and cubed potatoes with salad
Meatballs and pasta
Salmon fish fingers, rice and salad

Every day there’s a jacket potato option and a veggie alternative for the meat/fish.

Pudding is cheese and cracker, fruit, jelly and ice cream.

The meat isn’t great quality, obviously, but compared to a sandwhich, crisps, chocolate bar, yogurt etc that most children have in their packed lunch I’d say it’s 100% better nutritionally.

but compared to a sandwhich, crisps, chocolate bar, yogurt etc that most children have in their packed lunch I’d say it’s 100% better nutritionally.

I'd much rather a child eats that packed lunch than going an entire year eating just a cracker. I really hope the school informed the parents / carers that he wasn't eating, especially as crackers aren't served every day, so most days he wasn't actually eating anything.

We live somewhere where packed lunches are the norm. Both shift workers, both long hours, both regularly at work at night etc. We do a lunch box for everyone every day. Takes a few minutes if you’re organised with shopping.

There might be other reasons to do school dinners - I don’t know about costs and nutrition and so on - but being a busy shift worker isn’t one.

Agreed! How can anyone think a sandwich, packet of crisps and a yoghurt is worse than a 4 year old eating nothing but a cracker 5 days a week for a whole year!

School dinners at the school I work at are mostly beige, processed and devoid of nutrients I’m sorry to say. For convenience, I eat them a couple of times a week and they don’t taste great either. But it depends what’s going in the packed lunch and how much it’s inconveniencing/costing you.

There is likely to be a salad bar; if you stick with the school lunch option make sure she uses it, it’s usually decent. Also explore the veggie and jacket potato options which are sometimes (not always) better.

@Snowdropcow but she is not fed if she won’t eat it.

OP, My ds has also just started reception and refuses the food. At home he eats everything and he has a huge appetite as seems t be in an endless growth spurt.
So I have let him switch to packed lunches and he is literally happier and concentrating better at school as a result. He has 1.5 cheese or chicken sandwiches, salad and two types of fruit. It’s healthy and filling and takes no time to assemble if I am well organised. I will try school meals again in the future but for now he wants what he wants and I want him to have a meal between 8am and 6pm!

My son swapped to packed lunches in reception - his older sister had already swapped and he didn’t like the school dinner food either (and was reporting he ate ‘chips and jelly’ for lunch). We got a bento box style lunchbox, he has sandwich/cold pasta/cous cous/sausage roll in the main bit, a compartment of salad bits, a compartment of fruit, and a pudding compartment. It all gets eaten and I know he’s had a balanced meal. It is a pain making it in the morning but only takes 5 minutes.

I'd be surprised if they don't have this option. When my DDs were at school they nearly always had a jacket potato with a filling and salad.
They didn't like the man meals.

In my experience of (mainly secondary) school meals, the menu may sound enticing and the food may even look
good, but the ingredients are cheap and poor quality. A pp mentioned bags of rubbery cheese dusted in flour, which doesn’t melt. Add bread with a use by date of months, chewy cubed ‘meat’, lumpy grey mince etc. A final blow for primary children is the plastic tray for little prisoners. DS would not have coped with that ☹️

I think free school meals for KS1 should be abolished. We are fortunate to live in a relatively affluent area, lines of Range Rovers etc outside school at 3:30. These people can afford to feed their own children. The money should go to improving the meals for those in genuine need.

My son has had packed lunch throughout. They tried him with dinners and plonked a plate of mash, peas, and ham in front of him and it scarred him for life! He doesn’t eat meat, ( I had told them this!) and doesn’t like peas, so he thinks that’s school dinners now. I make a packed lunch every day and he eats it all, so we’ll stick with that for now.
He eats it all, so I know he’s full up. They now have a nice veggie menu so I’m hoping he’ll try dinners soon as it’s free

I am that mean mum who insisted my dc have school lunches despite their protests

they’re now yr 6 and 4 and thus not free but actually choose to have the school lunches. The fussier of the two def eats a broader range of stuff because he has got used to it. It would be jam sandwiches every day if I did give in.

Dc started school a very good eater. He was very excited to be given food by school staff! However, a few terms in he became the pickiest eater, so much so that he went off many foods at home too.

By spring term he had very persistent stomach problems and missed two weeks of school (wasn't yet five).

I started packed lunches on some days only until next the Sept when he was literally sick by the look of the sausages he had to eat... I started packing lunches and never looked back.

Now he's older he remembers he had some awful days in Reception, where the lunch supervisors would tell him he can't have pudding until he has had more of main food and he absolutely hated it. It had affected his time at school and also definitely affected his eating.

His packed lunches can be boring and often he'll focus on the fruit and the veg, leave most of the sandwich, but we are slowly bringing back his willingness to try all kinds of foods again. I know exactly what he has eaten at school, I know his food was homemade and reasonably wholesome.

Now he's free to focus on friendships and learning and not dread lunchtime.

There are two arguments why it's being done;

1. Because parents with Range Rovers can also be neglectful and fail to give their children adequate nutrition at home and at school and there are plenty of people who are still skint even if they don't qualify for FSM due to working fulltime (the eligibility for FSM has been reduced recently).
2. Because the mass catering companies were pissed off about losing money and persuaded the DfE that they should have a guaranteed income from at least part of the school cohort - good PR for the Government nice backhander for some ministers and MPs, minimum income for the companies, everybody's happy.

Firstly, I would speak to the teacher. Your daughter may be being truthful but she may also just prefer the idea of a packed lunch.

When my son was in reception, particularly in the first term, staff kept a very close eye on what they were eating. If she isn't eating, they should know and I would be surprised if they haven't mentioned it to you.

At the school I work in, the dinners are good and my ds still has dinners now, in Y5 so think his are good. That said, there are a few options at his school - sometimes he has jacket potato with cheese and beans or tuna wraps with stuff. There is always a salad table as well where they can help themselves to extras, which he does.
All schools are different though.

School dinners are so much easier but ultimately, if she really isn't eating them, I would swap to packed lunches. I know it's additional work but they can be made the night before.

I'm a teacher and do supply in primary schools. Oddly, there is huge variation in the quality of the meals. One of the schools doesn't allow any packed lunches and to be fair their food is pretty good, though portions are small. One of the schools I work in has atrocious meals. The 'burger' is a small hard patty about 5cm in diameter on a white roll which is bigger than the burger, no sauce or moisture in there at all. They will then have a single slice of melon with it which has dried out by the time it is served and a few carrot sticks. Awful. A lot of kids on fsm at that school who don't really have the option of packed lunch while the middle class parents send their kids in with a lovely pack up they eat next to them! I don't understand why it varies so much from area to area.

The meat isn’t great quality, obviously, but compared to a sandwhich, crisps, chocolate bar, yogurt etc that most children have in their packed lunch I’d say it’s 100% better nutritionally.

I hope we are moving to culture where parents put less UPFs in their kids lunch packs. They look yummy and taste yummy, because obvs they are edibles made for profit, and the more kids have them the more kids want to also have them.
More of us, surely, realise they are definitely not nutritious and are potentially harmful in the long term.

And no- you are not a less fun parent for putting your kid's health first.

So natural yoghurt - great, something colourful and flavoured, not so much.

Doughnuts with sprinkles (looking at my dc best friend's parent), please don't.

My parents had that attitude, so I didn’t eat at primary school as the food was vile.

The burger, meatballs and salmon fingers will have a similar nutritional value to typical sandwich meat. Rice, bread, pasta and potato have decent calorie value, but minimal nutritional value. The roast potatoes are likely cooked in oil, so really shouldn’t be eaten on a regular basis. Unless the vegetables are very lightly boiled or lightly steamed their nutrional value will be minimal (and they will taste awful). Lots of salad is very low in nutritional value, so you have to eat lots to get a decent amount of vitamin c etc. Two of those meal options don’t have a single portion of vegetables.

Do you eat the school dinners?

No I don't eat the school dinners myself, being a small primary the cooks tend to make only what's been ordered, but theres about 3 teachers who literally fight over the leftovers every day.

When I was a child I ate school dinners and really enjoyed them though.

If your sending your child to school with a completely healthy, perfectly balanced nutritious packed lunch that you child eats and enjoys then thats great! Unfortunately 98% of packed lunches I've seen during dinner duty are the bog standard sandwich, crisps, chocolate bar, yogurt, dairylea dunker and a single piece of fruit that gets put back in their lunchbox or binned. Some children even have cold pizza, cold mcdonalds, cold chips etc

So it's clear most parents send their child with a packed lunch with food they know their child will eat because children can be fussy but it's not because their packed lunch is more nutritious.

Yes his Mum wanted to keep him on dinners to get him to try new foods as he was fussy at home too. He clears his plate every day now and Mum is very happy about that.

Why don’t you order a school meal? The pack ups you mention sound very similar to the nutritional value of the school meals. Why are hot chips the school serves okay, but cold ones aren’t? Why is naan okay, but naan with tomato and cheese and top isn’t? Why is a hot burger okay, but a cold one in a lunch box isn’t?

Why do you care if I eat the meals? Staff can't order meals for themselves. They are for the children. If theres leftovers then staff can share them.

The pack ups you mention sound very similar to the nutritional value of the school meals.

If you think that, fine. I can't really help you.

If it’s good enough for children, it should be good enough for the adults. Advocating that if a starving child will give in after a year of not eating properly isn’t a standard any child should be exposed to.