Remember when you were young and your mom packed your lunch for school? Years ago you probably got peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a paper bag with maybe an apple, and, if you were lucky, a snack like a cookie or bag of chips. Well, apparently that’s not the case anymore, with more and more moms packing elaborate lunches for their children.
Apparently moms these days are obsessed with giving their kids a variety of choices at lunch, and go out of their way to make the food enticing to youngsters. The popularity of Bento Box containers, which separate food into compartments, and of course, Instagram bragging, have motivated parents to step up their game when it comes to lunchtime.
There are several Instagram accounts that offer inspiration for such fancy bento box lunches, and it is definitely stressing some parents out. “It’s kind of frustrating to see their posts,” mom MeeshaChang, who meticulously packs her kid’s lunch every night, says. “I can’t really re-create [them] … It’s not realistic for me.”
And all this lunch packing is super time consuming. Mom Chloe Gottlieb says she spends between four and five hours prepping lunches early for the week, and then another 15 to 30 minutes each morning. “The lunches are more elaborate,” she says of her daughter’s fellow students' meals. “Before it was a simple bag lunch, it was a lot of sandwiches. Now, it’s a lot of bento boxes.”
- And some moms who aren’t resourceful enough to make their kids lunch are spending a lot to keep up. Mom Lainie Gutterman notes she gets her kids lunch from popular restaurants each day, at a cost of about $15 per meal. “I know I’m sending in a lunch my daughter looks forward to, enjoys, will devour,” she says. “I don’t have to feel guilty that I’m feeding her crap.”
Source:New York Post