The Aldi receipt from last Wednesday is still on the kitchen table, folded in thirds, with eleven lines highlighted in orange. Eleven lines is what a week of Isla's packed lunches comes to once you stop pretending it's "a bit of bread and some cheese".
On Monday 6 January, the first day back, I started a lunchbox spreadsheet. There's one row for every item that goes into Isla's lunchbox, with columns for the date, the item, what it cost, and one called "came home", which is the one I was most nervous about. Isla is in Year 4 and takes a packed lunch every day. Alfie, in Reception, has free infant school dinners, so he isn't on the spreadsheet at all. (He says Tuesday's pasta is "the best thing that ever happened", and I've decided not to compete.) His column is empty and I enjoy looking at it.
Splitting one receipt five ways
The fiddly part is that a receipt gives you a loaf, not a slice. An 89p loaf has twenty slices, so a slice is 4.45p and eight slices is 36p. A pack of six cheese portions at £1.38 is 23p each. I did the same for the ham, the eggs, the carrots and the oats for the flapjacks, and my old colleagues would have recognised the face I pull when I do it. Here is the week of 6 to 10 January, all of it going into the two-compartment bento box:
- Bread, eight slices, for the four sandwich days: 36p
- Fillings (ham twice, egg mayonnaise once, cheese slices once): £1.52
- Wednesday's pasta salad (leftover pasta, sweetcorn, a spoon of pesto): 41p
- Cheese portions, five: £1.15
- Cucumber and carrot sticks: 52p
- Fruit, five pieces: £1.10
- Flapjack, four days (a batch of sixteen cost £3.52): 88p
- Mini oat crackers, three days: 44p
- Friday treat, a chocolate biscuit from a multipack: 20p
That's £6.58 for the week, or £1.32 a day, plus water from the tap in the bottle with the dented lid.
Next to the school dinner
A Key Stage 2 school dinner is £2.75, so five of them would have been £13.75, and the packed lunches came in £7.17 cheaper. If the first week is typical, and it won't quite be, because the Friday treat will creep and fruit gets dearer, a school year of about 190 days comes out at £250.80 against £522.50. That's a gap of £271.70. I'll find out in July.
I should say what this isn't. Isla's reason for taking a packed lunch is that school dinners are "always cold" by the time her class is served, and that's reason enough for her. The dinners aren't on trial here. I just wanted the packed lunch's price written down for once, instead of guessed.
The "came home" column
Three entries in week one. On Tuesday, an apple with two bites out of it (20p). On Wednesday, half the pasta salad (21p), because the pesto, as Isla put it, "made everything taste green". And on Thursday, the carrot sticks (7p), which came home so bendy they could have been tagliatelle. That's 48p of waste, so what Isla actually ate cost £6.10.
Isla looked over my shoulder at the screen on Sunday night, read down the "came home" column and said, "You've written down my carrot sticks." I said that was the whole idea. She asked if there was a column for what she'd traded with Maisie, and there isn't, and I'd like to keep it that way.
So there are two changes already. Wednesday's pasta gets sweetcorn and a spoon of mayonnaise, which was Isla's own suggestion, and the carrots get cut thicker so they stay stiff until twelve o'clock. Both are 2p changes, but I've learned that in a lunchbox 2p is where the margin lives.
The frost was thick on the car on Thursday morning when Rob left for the delivery office at 5:40, and Isla's lunchbox was already in the fridge, packed the night before. That is the real saving of a Sunday sort-out, if I'm honest: not the pennies, but nobody doing arithmetic at 8:15 with the kettle going. I'll add up the weeks at the end of the month and see whether the £1.32 holds. If it doesn't, I would rather know.
