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My last child (now a college sophomore) simply would not eat the school food. He took his lunch which we put together the night before, and put it in the fridge, from 5th grade thru high school. He took cheese nearly every day - brie, cheddar, goat cheese, some baguette, a leftover artichoke and homemade mayonnaise, cut up fruit, sometimes meat (fried chicken breasts were a favorite), a hard-boiled egg with a tiny vial of salt and pepper, salad and homemade ranch or vinaigrette, a few cold shrimp. When he had a helpful teacher who had a microwave, he started to bring reheatable leftovers. What amazed me was how popular his lunches were with other kids! And what amazed me was that they and their parents kept buying lunches at the school cafeterias, even though most of it got thrown away every day!

He spent the summer studying in France this year, and he cooked his dinner every night on his little 2-burner stove. He saw "cheese crumbs" in a supermarket, and tried fried brie, he cooked artichokes as big as his head, he ate a baguette for breakfast with coffee and one with dinner, made pesto from scratch. All of his friends, when they weren't eating at his place went out and paid for meals (with the dollar at @1.40 to the Euro!!!). He found a not just decent, buy pretty damn good red wine for 2 Euro for 1.5 liters (waaay cheaper than coke!), and found a tagine at the flea market and cooked and ate tagine for the first time. He had fresh cherries and white-fleshed peaches for dessert, and then went and did his homework in a cafe or brasserie with wi-fi, nursing a glass of wine or a bier presse.

It starts at the top AND at the bottom. We need to slow down our food preparation and our dining, we need to teach our kids what good food tastes like, and we need laws that help us ensure safe, nutritious food in this country.

Izzy, I was just writing something about the value of turning tonight's dinner into tomorrow's lunch. It's something I need to put into practice more often. Tomorrow night we're having bulgogi for dinner; I'm sure Iris would be delighted to have that at school.

So how much should I worry about the lunch sitting unrefrigerated between 9am (when we leave for school) and 12:30pm (lunchtime)?

Ice pack it is! At Iris's school they're happy to reheat in the microwave, but they don't have fridge space, I don't think.

Any school lunch diiscussion should mention Jamie Oliver's school dinner campaign in the U.K. While there's a web site : http://www.jamieoliver.com/schooldinners but it's the the series of shows that are incredible. I think the only way to see it in the U.S. is to download them via bittorrent, but it's an eyeopener. I watched it about the time Sicko had hit the theaters. Instead of seeing someone whine about how things were bad and "someone" should fix them we saw multi-millionaire Jamie Oliver spending months trying to figure out how to serve kids healty lunches for about $0.75 a day that was also something they would want to eat and enjoy. He worked with the teachers, administrators, parents and the kids to try to make it work.

Leftovers are what I survived on for years as a student (grade school through college). My Mom always had a box in the fridge for snacks. I could dig into it any time I wanted. It had serial bars, carrot sticks, hard boiled eggs, celery sticks ... anything easy to grab and eat all properly portioned out. Every day at least one of these would go into my bagged lunch. In place of an ice pack, I used a reusable bottle of frozen fruit juice.