Bringing your own lunch to school and work

As a college student, eating out for lunch is easy. As is buying ready-made food from the grocery store. Unfortunately both ways can quickly get prohibitively expensive and blow any kind of nutritious diet you might be trying to maintain. Going hungry shouldn’t be an option for many reasons and Prevention, a healthy life-style magazine that has been around for over 70 years, says that while you may think you are only missing calories, you are actually hurting your metabolism and you are making yourself tired, neither of which are good for college students who are working hard. According to the Expatistan website, a collaborative cost of living website that helps people decide what living in a certain area will cost, it costs $16 for a no-frills lunch in Anchorage’s business district. Eating lunch out even just once a week can easily set you back $60 every month.
It doesn’t matter who you are – college student, university employee, or a dorm resident, if you are too far from your personal kitchen to easily access it , bringing your own lunch might be a solution. 

What is stopping you from bringing your own lunch? Maybe you have tried and found yourself in a rut, remaking the same sandwich from foods you purchased on your latest Costco run. That is a way to eat, but it quickly becomes boring and is easy to forget to do if you are uninspired.
I have found that packing a lunch every day isn’t something you declare you will suddenly do. If you are not already in the habit, bringing any meal to school or work on a regular basis is a lifestyle change. After several failed attempts, I got into a routine when I decided that I would bring lunch to school for myself on a certain day of the week. The savings started adding up. By the end of that semester I was making lunch for every member of my family five days a week and was able to allocate a significant portion of my family’s budget to other expenses. It was like getting a raise.
What works for one person for making lunches every day might not incentivize someone else. For me it was saving money, but my teenage daughter Tatiana enjoyed coming into our kitchen and chatting with me while I made lunches. Sometimes she helped me as I prepared food. Now she is hooked and has some friends with whom she Zooms, and they make lunches together a few evenings during the week.
Purchasing food to make into lunches can be a challenge. It is easier and more cost effective if I buy small bags of chocolates or trays with portions of cheeses and raisins– otherwise I would probably eat multi-serving bags as snacks. When my family was bigger, buying loose and in bulk was easier. If you see deli meat on sale and you want to save it, Good Housekeeping gives details on freezing it, and you can use the packaging it came in.
When it comes to processed foods, I discovered that not all are created alike. According to Healthline, the term “healthy” is not used as much because it “demonizes” foods that are processed. The current word is “nutrient-dense,” which refers to foods that have a lot of nutrients per gram. 

According to WebMD, most adult males need an average of 56 grams of protein every day, and most adult females need an average of 46 grams. To get an idea of what this means food-wise, an egg salad sandwich can give you 10 grams of protein, which is almost 20% of your protein requirement. Peanut butter, of which two tablespoons equals 8 grams of protein, is an affordable source. Good Housekeeping has compiled a list of 30 processed foods, with Hippeas Organic Chickpea Puffs near the top of the list as a prime choice of a processed food that is both a significant source of protein, and nonperishable.
When I started making and bringing my lunches to school every day, I realized that I wasn’t always going to be scoring gold stars on every meal. Usually my lunches brought to school and work are “fine” — nothing to brag about, but still filling and I look forward to eating them.

I don’t have a problem eating a sandwich most days with a few high protein snacks to round them out. Two fancified lunches make up for the run of the mill lunches on other days. I would like to be plastic free, but that is a work in progress. After several years of eating with plastic utensils, I spent around $9 on a small container from Walmart that holds a knife, fork, and spoon. IT took me that long to decide that I would wash my silverware after every meal and I have a dedicated place to store it in my backpack where I won’t lose it. It is always fun to try new things and what website is better for inquiring than Bon Appétit? Senior Editor Christina Chaey says, “I’ve also found creative freedom in ditching the notion that lunch has to look like something you’d find on the menu at an all-day café.” She challenges readers to spend some time cooking every day, which is where it doesn’t take a lot of time to try something new with little commitment. “I’ll put on the kettle for coffee, then tackle a small cooking task in the six or so minutes it takes the water to come to a boil.” She describes using that time to saute some fresh greens, oil, and garlic, or make a sauce that she will use later. She calls these “mini-prep moments.”I have tried Chaey’s idea of cooking something on the stove while my tea water is heating up and I like it. It is almost like setting a timer for myself to speed things up in the morning, a game of seeing how much I can get done in six minutes. I do most of my preparation the night before, simply because if I don’t have time to clean up, I feel terrible thinking that one of my family members will walk into it later. I think that the experience of making and taking my own meals to school and work has been a 100% good experience. It has been better with my daughter also getting into the habit because she doesn’t think of it as a chore– it is just something she does. We are saving money, we are guiltlessly eating every day. When we learn and share good habits, we influence people around us to do the same.