I'm a teaching assistant and spend 5 days a week eating my dinner with 5 young children with severe allergies to make sure they don't food swap without thinking and get poorly (surrounded by 400 other kids without severe allergies - this is not a tranquil dining option)!
For this, I get a free school dinner, which though not my dinner of choice is ok and well .. free. Best bit is the trays of fresh fruit slices we now have on offer every day and there is always fruit salad too.
The children with severe allergies are all foreign (are you allowed to say foreign these days
). Danish girl has a jam sandwich and a chocolate sandwich. One chinese boy often has sushi, either rolled or just balls of rice with seaweed scrunched in or he brings cold roast vegetables and cold meat e.g. pheasant or beef, he sometimes brings hot prawn and vegetable rice in a flask too. The other chinese boy brings cold rice noodles with a bit of fried spring onion and sweetcorn. The japanese girl brings cold soya bacon or ham, seaweed sheets, some kind of dried oriental plum fruit leather and a jelly. Australian boy always has a hot cross bun , sliced red pepper, crisps, fruit and a ham sandwich made from one slice brown bread and one slice white bread.
I realise this is probably a bit off topic but I find it interesting! A lot of the african and asian kids bring cold leftovers from the night before's tea which none of the english parents ever seem to do and the english lunch boxes always seem to include 'puddings' or sweets (yoghurt, biscuits, fruit etc) whereas a lot of the foreign kids only bring savoury foods.
Particularly it is amazing to me how many children have exactly the same lunch 5 days a week for years on end!
In the days when I had to make my own dinners, I had lots of pasta or rice salad which I made up while cooking tea the night before or would do an oven full of jacket potatoes and take one and day with coleslaw or 'savoury cheese' (make up big tub of grated cheese mixed with mayo, chopped peppers, cucumber, tomato etc.). I'd often make a trifle or jelly at the weekend and spoon some into tupperware tubs for each day so they were ready to go as I'm usually hopeless in the mornings.
I will stop now, I seem to have far too much to say about lunch!
(thanks)
