"They go flat by dinner time," Isla said, "and they all taste like Tuesday." She said it at the kitchen table on Sunday 27 April, with the week's lunchbox list in front of me and a pen in my hand, in the voice of someone who had been rehearsing. She was bored of sandwiches.
I'd been making her a sandwich or half a one since September. That is a lot of bread, and I could hardly argue. So we agreed on an experiment: six school weeks, 28 April to 13 June, with as few sandwiches as I could get away with. I added a column to the lunchbox spreadsheet with one letter for what came home. E for empty, H for half, U for untouched.
What went in the box
Isla's box is the bento one, £12.99, with a big compartment and a small one. The big side took the main thing, and the small side held a cheese portion, fruit and cucumber or carrot sticks, with a flapjack or a biscuit squeezed in somewhere. Fridays stayed a treat. The slim ice pack went in every day, and from the week of 9 June, when it hit 22 degrees, I put in two.
Over 29 school days, 25 of the boxes were sandwich-free. Here is the scorecard.
- Pasta salad (fusilli, sweetcorn, cucumber, cheese cubes, a spoon of pesto), £1.26 a box: 8 boxes, 7 empty, 1 half
- Ham and cheese pinwheels (a wrap, rolled and sliced), £1.34: 4 boxes, all empty
- Chicken mayo wrap, £1.58: 2 boxes, both half
- Hummus and carrot wrap, £1.44: 1 box, untouched
- Crackers, cheese slices, ham rolls and grapes, £1.55: 5 boxes, 4 empty, 1 half
- Cold leftovers (a chicken drumstick, or a cold slice of Friday pizza), £1.11: 4 boxes, all empty
- Cold fried rice, 98p: 1 box, untouched
Nineteen of the 25 came home empty. Four came back half-eaten and two came back exactly as they went, give or take a thawed ice pack.
It was more work, but not much more. A sandwich box takes me about five minutes in the evening, and a pasta box nine, which I timed with the oven timer. I cook 300g of pasta on Sunday for 36p and it does Monday and Tuesday, and Isla now does her own fruit and cheese. Her friends noticed, too. A boy at her table offered two crisps for a pinwheel and she says she held out for three.
The ones that flopped
The hummus wrap was my fault. I made it in a hurry and overfilled it, and by dinner time it was a damp tube of regret. The cold fried rice was a better idea on Sunday night than at 12:30 in a classroom. She didn't want it, and I wasn't happy about rice sitting in a bag for four hours anyway, so I've stopped packing it. The chicken mayo wraps came back half-done twice, and the pattern turns out to be that Isla likes chicken but not mayonnaise, which she told me afterwards as if I should have known.
The surprise was the cold leftovers. I'd assumed she'd hate a cold pizza slice. She took it to school on a Monday and brought home a clean box and a note in her handwriting on the back of a receipt: "pizza = good cold." I now have a reason to make a bigger fakeaway on Fridays.
What it cost
Across the 29 days the spreadsheet says £38.33, which is £1.32 a day, a penny above this year's average so far. The four sandwich days cost £1.28 each, so pasta salad at £1.26 edged under them. The cheese and cracker box is the dearest at £1.55, and cold leftovers the cheapest, because they were already paid for.
The bento box has coped well, though the clip on the lid is getting loose, and I'm keeping an eye on it. Isla washes it herself on Fridays, a deal we struck in January that she hasn't noticed she could renegotiate.
For the summer, the pasta salad goes on the list as the default, pinwheels are the alternate, and the cold pizza gets a regular slot. The hummus wrap is dead. Last Thursday, in the middle of all this, Isla asked for a plain cheese sandwich. I made it without comment. It came home empty.
