With an hour-long lunch period, your dining options are limitless. But when the line for cafeteria food gets too long and going out to eat everyday gets expensive, what do you do? Packing your own lunches might be the solution. Here’s how to get started.
When watching videos of moms packing their kids’ lunches with their mini sauce containers and colorful food picks, you might thing that you need to buy a whole arsenal of supplies to pack your own lunch. While you don’t need all that, there are a few things that make packing lunch easier. To start, you’ll need a lunch bag. In order to keep your food from getting messed up in the heat, an insulated bag or ice packs are the way to go. To store your food, you can use Ziploc bags, tinfoil (for larger items), and Tupperware or other small containers. Bento boxes are especially convenient, and many come with dividers built in. Finally, you’ll need silverware to eat your food and a water bottle or drink to go with your meal.
In order to make sure your lunch is actually healthy and not just a bunch of random snacks, you can follow this easy formula: your main dish, a fruit or vegetable, and a little snack or treat. This splits your lunch into three easy, flexible categories. You don’t have to eat sandwiches every day, either: if you want pack leftovers from dinner, ask your parents to set aside some food for you to eat the next day. If you want to have hot food for lunch, there are plenty of microwaves available around campus- but try to avoid anything that takes too long. If you want to make something like microwavable mac and cheese or a frozen meal, heat it up it the night before, put it in the fridge overnight, then reheat it the next day.
Learning how to pack your own lunches is cheap, healthy, and allows you to ensure that you’ll actually eat. “I’ve been packing my own lunches since I started middle school. I’m a picky eater, and I like being able to pick what I want to eat,” says Vanessa Sandoval Velez, a junior Creative Writer. When deciding on goals for the coming school year, make packing yummy lunches one of them.
