Curse of Pandora's lunchbox

The school packed lunch can be a nutritional and social minefield, says Katie Tait

Twenty years ago, a school packed lunch would have consisted of a Penguin biscuit, a packet of crisps with a salt sachet inside and a white-bread sandwich with too much Marmite. But now, like everything else in modern parenting, it's not so easy.

The contents of that Thomas the Tank Engine or Scooby Doo lunchbox could leave your child ostracised, starving or furious and could even have you called into the headteacher's office. As a result, many parents are succumbing to a new condition: Tupperware Anxiety.

	Boxing clever: a child eats pasta

Tupperware Anxiety (or TA) takes many forms. First there is the fear that your child may feel you haven't taken enough trouble. "You want them to open their box and for it to be a little gift of love to them," says Lisa Hynes who lives in Oxford with her three children.

"They're away from you all day and it's a moment when you can be with them again. The problem was that I was filling their lunchboxes so full they could hardly carry them. They had a smoothie, an apple juice, two sandwiches, some dips, two bits of fruit and one small treat. A friend finally said to me: 'You're overdoing the love.'"

Next is the anxiety induced by trying to find a compromise between what you want your child to eat - hummus with carrot sticks and mango and kiwi slices - and what your child would like to eat: Dairylea Dippers and Fruit Shoots.

Anna, mother of Grace and Lily, finally had to admit she had got the balance wrong when Grace started stealing from other children's boxes. "Because the girls don't each a lot of fruit and vegetables at home, I was determined to fill their boxes with healthy food so they could catch up with their five a day. A teacher had to tell me that Grace had taken a Hungry Hippo from another girl's lunchbox and suggested that I could let my children have the odd treat as well."

The next TA is the Friday morning "empty-fridge" panic. This leads to extreme creativity with bowls of cold mince and bits of leftover bread. The shepherd's-pie sandwich is yet to take off at my daughter's school, but I'm its most passionate advocate.

A warning, though: the day you send your child to school with the leftovers from last night's supper is always the day they're going home to tea at a friend's house.

This friend's mother will kindly take it upon herself to wash the lunchboxes and come face to face with what looks extraordinarily like a whole shepherd's-pie sandwich.

Alpha Parents can induce the worst kind of Tupperware Anxiety. They're the ones who carve the word "mummy" into the skin of a banana and produce perfect little containers of poached salmon and green beans.

There is even a website where one American mother displays daily photographs of her daughter's lunchbox. They are works of art. Sushi, edible flowers and freshly squeezed juice all laid out in separate compartments.

The only consolation is that by the time her daughter has banged her box against her leg a few times on the way to school, the contents won't look quite so beautiful.

Then, when you've got past the other parents, you have to face the school itself. Different schools have different rules but disobey them and it's not just your child's health that will suffer.

Tim Baker, headmaster of Charlton Manor Primary in Greenwich, south-east London, takes a zero-tolerance approach to packed lunches. "We allow chocolate on biscuits but not chocolate bars and we think crisps are inappropriate. If the wrong items are found in a pupil's lunchbox, I will ring the parents and ask them to come and see me."

At least the school doesn't have to monitor the boxes themselves. "The children are the first to report any offenders and will come and show me the contents of their own packed lunches."

There is nothing, however, to match the horror committed by Lisa Hynes: "It was the end of the week and our food delivery wasn't coming until the evening. I managed to scramble together some sandwiches and then found an old bag of raisins in the back of the cupboard. I wrapped a few up in clingfilm and sent Louis off to school. When he came home, he proudly reported that the raisins had been 'moving'.

On closer questioning, it transpired that the raisins were infested with maggots.

"Much to my shame, I was more worried about whether the teacher had noticed. Louis says he did show them to her and she just said maybe you had better not eat them." The other option was to tell her it was just the latest food trend from Japan.

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