Ideas
A week of school lunches for a kid who eats five things
If your kid eats five things, plan the week from those five things. Put at least one food they always finish in every box, change one thing at a time, and write down what comes home, so next week is built from what they ate rather than what you hoped.
That is the whole method. The rest of this page is how to do it on a Sunday in about ten minutes.
Start with the list, not the recipes
Write down every food your kid has eaten at school without a fight in the last month. Not what they eat at home on a good day: what came home eaten. For most picky eaters the list is short and oddly exact. One brand of cracker. Plain pasta, no sauce. Apple slices, but only peeled. A particular yogurt.
Sort the list into four compartments: a main, a side, a fruit and a sweet. The main is the thing that fills them up. The side is usually the crunchy thing. One compartment will be nearly empty. That is normal, and it is where to add one new food at a time, later.
One safe food in every box
Every box gets at least one food from the list, and ideally it is the main. A lunch period is short and loud, and a kid who opens the box and sees nothing familiar often eats nothing. A safe main means that even on a bad day they come home having eaten something.
Repeat on purpose
Five lunches do not need five different mains. Two or three that rotate is plenty, and many picky eaters like knowing what is coming. What makes a repeated main feel different is what sits next to it: the same plain pasta with pretzels on Monday and with cucumber rounds on Thursday.
Pair by texture. Something crunchy next to a soft main, something soft next to a dry one. Crackers and cheese want a juicy fruit beside them; pasta wants something with a snap.
A week from a short list might look like this:
- Monday: plain pasta, pretzels, apple slices, a cookie
- Tuesday: cheese and crackers, cucumber rounds, grapes, a yogurt tube
- Wednesday: plain pasta, cheese cubes, a clementine, a mini muffin
- Thursday: turkey roll-ups, crackers, apple slices, a cookie
- Friday: cheese and crackers, pretzels, grapes, a mini muffin
Three mains, four sides, three fruits, three sweets. Every day has a main they already eat.
Change one thing at a time
When you want to try something new, change one compartment and leave the other three alone. Put the new food in the side or the fruit, never the main. If it comes home, you have lost one side, not a lunch.
Put it back in a week or two rather than dropping it after one try. A food a kid has seen in their own box a few times is a different food from one they are meeting for the first time in a cafeteria.
Write down what came home
This is the part most plans skip, and it is the most useful. After school, open the box and note what came back. After two weeks you will know which foods are safe at school and which were only ever safe at your kitchen table.
If the same food comes home two days running, give it a rest for a few weeks. It has not failed; it is tired. Bring it back later and it often goes down again.
Let them choose between boxes you already planned
A lunch they chose tends to come home emptier. The trick is to offer a choice between boxes you have already planned and shopped for, not an open question. "This one or that one?" the night before works. "What do you want for lunch?" at 7am does not.
Shop once
Write one list for the week from the five boxes, with how many of each: ten crackers a day is a box, not a sleeve. Buy it on the weekend, and the week is done before Monday.
Where Lunch Sorted fits
We built Lunch Sorted because our own lunches kept coming home. It does this method for you: it plans the week from the foods on your kid's list, puts crunchy against soft (how it plans the week) and writes the shopping list, and that much is free for one lunchbox. On the Household plan, free for your first three weeks, it also asks after school what came home, puts a food that comes home twice in a row on hold for three weeks, and lets your kid choose the night before from the boxes you already shopped for, part by part or a whole box at a time.
The planner is free to try on the home page. The iPhone app is coming, and the waitlist there is how you hear when it's out.