back to school
School Lunches Zero Tolerance, Waste-Free Guilt By Cori Howard
I
t’s a rainy weekday morning and I am bustling around the kitchen in the half-dark, my eyes half-open, rummaging through the fridge for things to make for my children’s lunches. As I grab things and throw them onto the counter, I silently curse myself for not being more organized the night before. My nine-year-old son likes to have soup every day and will otherwise eat pretty much anything. My six-year-old, on the other hand, won’t eat soup or sandwiches, so, every day, I have to make two completely different lunches, all while making two different breakfasts. Making meals for my husband and I? Well, that’s just too much work. Usually, we just have tea and coffee. This morning, amidst the uncoordinated, ungraceful banging and clattering, my daughter comes quietly into the kitchen. I don’t notice her until she says, “Mom, no plastic in my lunch bag today, okay?” I turn around, shocked and watch her rub her eyes open. “It’s waste-free lunch week.” I contemplate the lunch spread out before me: plastic containers filled with healthy choices—salami, cheese, carrots and bean salad. “We can recycle these plastic containers, Jaz,” I tell her. “We are as waste-free as you get.” But apparently, that is not good enough. She comes over to peer at the day’s selection. “No cheese sticks, Mom. They are wrapped in plastic. No seaweed either. The package is bad.” I am horrified: not only because of the guilt that I feel giving my child so much packaged food and having her point it out to me, but also because that leaves me, and her, with far fewer food choices. In a panic, I tell her that she can just bring home the wrapper and we’ll make an art project out of it. This is a desperate bid to keep some healthy food options in her lunch box. And it’s a big, fat lie. She and I both know we won’t make an art project out of the cheese and seaweed and granola wrappers. But today, she goes along with it. Later, when I throw out the plastic wrappers that she so dutifully brings home, I am overcome with guilt and anger. Two years ago, I wrote a big feature story for a magazine about being a green parent. This was around the time they discovered plastic bottles contained the toxic chemical, BPA, and I went on a research mission to find good alternatives not only to plastic bottles, but to the sea of plastic that was taking over our homes and our lives. I went through the piles of plastic toys in my backyard and, together with my children, made piles of broken plastic for the dump, plastic toys we could recycle by giving them to other children and plastic toys that we wanted to keep.
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WestCoastFamilies.com
One of my biggest pet peeves was our profligate and outrageous use of the plastic bag in lunches. Again, I did my research and found a cool recyclable, washable sandwich wrapper. I still have them. I still use them. But you can’t wrap two cookies in it—it’s too big. And so, without realizing it, I reverted to my old ways, haphazardly overusing the Ziploc and losing my green cred. I have unwittingly become a mom who sends her kids to school with plastic wrappers. And worse, I have become the mom who resents the school with such a strict “zero-tolerance,” waste-free policy that even a relatively “green” mom like me fails.