Our school lunches are $2.65. The lunches here seem decent. They offer 3 main meals each day. Everyday there is also a choice of Yogurt, Hummus or PB&J sandwich. With the above you get a choice of fruit, veggie or starch. There is also a salad bar option. I have checked the lunch menus all year and was THRILLED to see NO FRENCH FRIES EVER. I think that's great! Although there is pizza every Friday, but the portions are small and kid appropiate. We also have a credit system, where I place money on her account. Kids don't handle money at all if they don't want to. I can also get an itemized list of what she has bought. My DD brings her lunch 95% of the time. Once a month they serve "Breakfast for Lunch" (Pancakes, turkey sausage & milk) which she absolutely loves. But I am very happy to pack her lunch since I know it's healthy and foods she enjoys and will eat. Normal day she gets turkey, carrot sticks, fruit (like apple slices, grapes) and popcorn. Kids are not allowed to "trade" or bring Candy for the snack, but I'm sure it goes on. My DD is picky, so she would not eat a school lunch each day-heaven forbid the sauce touch the pasta!! LOL My issue is that kids may take the veggie or fruit option but not eat it. Or just choose the starches and ala carte "junkier" items. I think our school system does the best they can with foods most kids like (Baked chicken tenders instead of fried) Most of the breads are Whole grains each day etc. Nice selection of fresh fruits. When I was in school the lunches were so/so. I knew my mom's fresh food was better then the mass produced, waiting under a heat lamp school lunch. I normally brought my lunch as it was MUCH quicker too. But you could have spent your "lunch" money on a meal of Twinkies and chips! I could strangle the 15 year old me, for all the junk I ate and NEVER thought twice about!!! Here is a link that might be useful: Lunch menu for the month

Lots of good ideas for me to agonize over. Thanks. I happened to be at a center with a World Market today, so I checked out their selection. I didn't see one tagged as 'Jane', but I picked one up that seemed like it could work (I think the nalgene will fit and the pocket on the opposite side could hold things outside a cold zone). When they rang it up...it said Blue Jane. :) I'll give it a go tomorrow. I also got some Lunch Blox at Costco. It was a set with two salad and one sandwich, I think. Which is pretty good for what I take. I wasn't sure I was going to keep them, but they were a pretty good deal for what you get. Thanks.

Just reporting back to let everyone know how the lunch went. Despite on and off showers, the temp was great so we were able to sit out on the deck, half of which is covered so we were dry and comfortable and enjoying the outdoors. Friend brought a hot appetizer with melted cheese that was delish. I had a Latin salami slices with cucumber slices; roasted red pepper hummus with pita chips, smoke gouda and jarlsburg cheese with crackers, and a dish with celery and carrot sticks. Lunch rec'd all kinds of compliments...grilled chicken breasts marinated in a lemon BBQ sauce and I served it with quinoa pesto (found it at TJs). Lentil salad with carrots and celery. Haricot vert with fennel and toasted pecans in a lemon dijon sauce (Martha Stewart). I sliced up a whole wheat ciabatta bread and had an herb package from which to make a dipping sauce with EVOO. For dessert I made a mixed berry crumble (blue and rasp) with choc chip ice cream from a local creamery. Coffee and tea. The beauty of it was that most of the cooking was done a day ahead so I was able to enjoy the company on the deck and not be a slave to the kitchen in prep.

In the original thread, Moni had written, "I was working in schools in the inner city, were a lot of poverty level families live. If you are in an lower income bracket, you can qualify for a free lunch. ALL breakfast are free. We had three tiers. Free, reduced, and full pay students. The free was the BIGGEST group." My nephew is now 29 years old, so it has been quite some time since he was in school. When he was in school, he qualified for free lunches because his mother is a disabled, low-income single mother. The "free lunch program" is still in existence today. If the girl in the original story truly cannot afford to pay for lunch, even the small amount of $1.70, she would qualify for the FLP and wouldn't need to be pleading for free food from any of the cafeteria workers. As JemDandy said (also in the original thread), "I don't think this was about a single $2 event. The management could not allow a precedent to develop that free food is available if you 'work the system'. If they allowed this for one student, they would have to permit it for any student else they could be cited for favoritism." Kids in middle school range in age from about 12 to about 15. They can be very clever. One kid can score a free meal by telling a cafeteria worker that he/she has no money, then that kid tells his/her friends, who try it the next day or a couple of days later, and pretty soon there will be a whole mess of kids pleading for food from the cafeteria workers. Don't think it wouldn't happen. SeniorGal had commented (also in the original thread), "Seems to me that we need to know WHY the child needed a free lunch." I completely agree. If the child is from a family that cannot afford to pay for a hot lunch, the child would qualify for the FLP and wouldn't need to be cajoling a cafeteria worker into giving food for free. If the child had lunch money at the beginning of the day, but spent it on junk from the vending machines, should she be rewarded for her poor choices? (Maybe she still had the money in her pocket but didn't want to spend it on lunch, preferring to save it for something else.) As had been pointed out by other folks, the food was not the cafeteria worker's to give away. Also, in the OP of this thread, Moni included, "Students are allowed to charge up to $11.00, but workers can still give them some food if they exceed that limit, according to reports." I'm wondering the child at the center of this controversy had already charged $11 worth of food and was still asking for more free food. Yes, it's a shame (and to some folks, a crime) to throw away extra food at the end of the day. But that's not something that's going to be changed unless the school district's policy changes. That's something to be brought up at school board meetings. And food that has been allowed to sit out for an extended period of time would be deemed unsafe and shouldn't be given away to anyone to consume. This is such a hot-button issue because it involves food and children. Would your reaction have been the same if the story had been about a Post Office employee giving free stamps to a customer because the customer couldn't otherwise mail her Christmas cards? A final comment... The cafeteria worker is described in the original article as a "server." The people who are serving/handling food cannot handle money (because money is filthy). So, there would be another worker who was the cashier. Also, the story says that the server "handed the girl the food and told her they'd take care of it in a minute." The server did not offer to pay for the food until after she had been busted by her supervisor. The implication in this is that the server handed the student the food, and then had the student go directly to a table to eat, without going past the cashier. The server didn't tell the cashier, "It's okay, I'll pay for it as soon as I can take a break and get to my purse," nor did the cashier take money out of her own pocket and give it to the child to take to the cashier. So that implies that the server knew what she was doing was against policy.