It seems like a very strange thing to food shame a preschooler, but here we are. “I’ve been lunchbox shamed,” read my friend’s caption on the picture she posted to social media of her child’s lunchbox, showing a sticker attached to the front of the lunchbox.
Before my kid started school, he did a year at kinder. Nude lunches, we were told, were the ideal; lunches with zero packaging or plastic. Desperate to please and show how little my job affected my parenting, I did this religiously, until I opened the kinder fridge one day and saw tens of lunchboxes all lined up: they contained pouches of yoghurt, packs of chips, muesli bars and lots of sugar-heavy bliss balls. Thank goodness, I sighed.
It’s the perfect example of a policy that looks great on paper, if you can completely divorce yourself from the fact that not everyone has the finances, nutritional education, time or inclination to spend hours each week constructing a lunchbox that jumps through someone else’s nutritional hoops. But ultimately, leaving aside the obvious danger of serious allergens like nuts, it’s up to parents to decide what’s in a kid’s lunchbox. If there are serious issues with what a kid is eating or, for instance, a kid who’s not bringing lunch at all, there’s a better way to address it then sending notes with no recognition of the cultural or financial reasons behind how lunchbox decisions are made.