How to make the perfect packed lunch – for toddlers, millennials and the middle-aged

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/sep/12/how-to-make-the-perfect-packed-lunch-for-toddlers-millennials-and-the-middle-aged

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It is that time of year when, if you are stupid like me, you are thinking about packed lunches for children, having failed to put your foot down about the perfectly fine school dinner. If you are smart, you are also thinking about packed lunches for yourself, because it is somehow more mature than going to Eat – the nutritional equivalent of having a crippling mortgage instead of crippling rent. So stand by for some sweeping statements about generational differences, as they relate to packed lunches.

Children like things to come in many segments, discreet packages containing different food groups, and you either have to beat this out of them or accept that lunch is never going to look very chic or nutritious. Mini Babybells and oaty bars, plastic bags full of grapes and single-ingredient sandwiches with the crusts cut off: this is the stuff of childhood dreams, with some Dunkers or ham and cheese Lunchables if you get super lucky with your parents. These foods are fine in and of themselves (I run a pretty loose ship); what they will not do is introduce a child to anything new. Adventures in a lifetime’s eating begin with combining foodstuffs, not keeping them all separate and wrapping them in clingfilm.

I know all that. Sadly, though, I was scarred in childhood by having a mother who thought nothing of making a sandwich out of ratatouille and dark rye bread, which by lunchtime would look and smell like a medieval poultice for warts. Once she sent me to school with a frankfurter and two eggs, which looked a lot like graffiti, the same day as my best friend came in with a boiled egg her equally countercultural mother had forgotten to boil: nobody spoke to us again without jeering for about 18 months. So I give my kids whatever they damn well please.

Millennials like things you eat instead of food – breakfast and other replacement bars, Huel, drinks so milky they pass for meals, cereals in disposable bowls … OK, maybe #notallmillennials, but the point is, you will never see a middle-aged person packing a lunch like this.

Which is because we like a packed lunch that looks so like a meal that if you took away the Tupperware, you could be at an Ottolenghi. I have ruminated often about why this is. Is it status anxiety, a fear that it is undignified to be eating a packed lunch for thrift in middle age? Are we doing it to pretend our food is better than Pret? Is it because the ravenous appetites of youth have subsided, so if you don’t tempt yourself, you will lose interest? Is it because we really like meals? It amounts, generally, to a one-pot dish, not a bunch of separate items like a hotel breakfast buffet, and definitely not a sandwich. You get enough sandwiches when you steal other people’s lunch.

The core consideration is that, whatever it is, it will be sitting around for a good few hours before you eat it. Anything with a very high water content will seep, which does not always matter – a very simple seaweed salad with sesame seeds can give out as much juice as it likes and just stew in it – but might make all the difference in the world: a panzanella that has been kept waiting will have a texture like my 80s ratatouille event. Most raw things will leave you feeling like you haven’t had enough, with the exception of Chinese salads, such as Xinjiang tiger salad, with its onion, green chilli, tomato and coriander. They are so powerful that they stay with you until the following week. An old George Orwell tip for when you are nearly starving is to eat so much garlic that for hours you feel as if you have just eaten. Your colleagues will also feel this way. You have to ask yourself how much you care.

Ideally, the sensation of a “good lunch” is created by cooked foods that work well at room temperature (I consider it an act of off-putting fastidiousness to keep your lunch in the fridge, while knowing that food hygiene standards mandate it). For a carb base, rice noodles are better than egg noodles and spaghetti (less claggy); pearl barley is better than rice (which goes chalky in the middle as it gets cold, while barley keeps its bite but stays squidgy); Israeli couscous is better than regular couscous (bigger and more fun); Puy lentils are better than quinoa (because quinoa is not nice); sweet potato is better than regular potato (it has more integral silkiness, so you don’t have to add butter to make it work, so it doesn’t congeal).

Meat that was intended to be eaten cold – smoked, cured, carpaccio – is going to be better than anything that has been stewed, which will harden as it cools, especially if it was a high-fat meat to begin with. Yet vegetables stewed in a Moroccan style, fish cooked in a Portuguese cataplana, Spanish omelette, Mexican beans and many, many curries are wonderful at any temperature. It is just English food that has to be a sandwich before you can eat it cold, and this you can blame on the Earl of Sandwich.