Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today's fairly short episode is about packed lunches getting ready for the start of term next week and specifically about how to keep packed lunch foods safe until lunchtime. As you know I'm a massive advocate for school meals. I worked in school food for many years and in an ideal world all school meals would be as good as the ones who follow the standards and would be free or more affordable for all families.
But I do know that in reality, because the regulations that were put in place to improve school food have been given too many loopholes, allowing too many schools to opt out, the dinners in a lot of schools are not so great and so many parents prefer to pack a lunch, or they find that their school dinners are unaffordable or their poor value for money. My kids ate a lot of school dinners but we also did a lot of packed lunches and I found them to be one of the most relentless parts of the mental load.
We will have an episode soon for some practical ideas for different things to put in a lunchbox when you've got stuck in a rut. But today's episode is going to focus on how to make sure your child's food is safe and doesn't end up giving them tummy problems. God knows they can pick up tummy bugs easily enough in the first few weeks back without us giving them food poisoning.
The main issue with lunchboxes is the storage of them between them being packed in the morning and then being eaten. Schools don't have fridge space for cold items and while many do their best by designating a cool corner in the classroom to store them, many just don't have the space and lunchboxes will usually end up staying in school bags or on pegs or in lockers for the majority of the day. If the hot weather in the last few weeks has made you think about how food will last in your child's hot classroom, then this episode is for you.
A while back I interviewed Jenna Brown, an environmental health officer known as Food Safety Mom online, for our episode on storing leftovers back in episode 4. But while we were there I also asked her how to keep lunchbox foods safe, so I have a little Q &A with her coming up now.
Joanne (02:05)
If you're packing a lunch for your kids and you're trying to tempt them to try more food, you know that some of it's going to come back uneaten or some of it might get shared with their friends. backwards So you're trying to make sure that what goes in that lunchbox you know is safe. Are there any rules about food safety in lunchboxes that are going to get kept at room temperature at school?
Jenna (02:22)
So when it comes to keeping cold food at room temperature, as a general rule of be outside of chilled conditions for up to four hours. So say for example, you're packing a lunch box at eight o'clock in the morning, then you've kind of gotten to 12. Now, obviously there are lots of things that you can do to make it last longer. I do actually share some of this on my Instagram, FoodSafetyMom. got some tips about how you can make sure your food is kept colder for longer. But things like, you know, the simple things like using an ice pack, keeping a cold drink, or maybe even freezing a drink. If you've got water, you can freeze a drink the night before. And then you can just pop it in the lunchbox and that'll actually act as a drink and as an ice pack for the day. Another top tip is if you actually make the sandwich the night before, so, for example, you're packing up lunches at seven o'clock in the morning and they don't actually have lunch until half twelve, If you actually make the sandwich the night before, then obviously once you take it out, it will still be cold. So it will last longer rather than making, sandwich using warm bread and cold ham, for example, that will warm the ham up.
Joanne (03:27)
Okay, so you've cooled the components overnight in your own fridge, so they're coming into the lunchbox a little bit colder.
Jenna (03:34)
Exactly. That and an ice pack, it will be absolutely fine. What you do then want to be wary of is once that comes home. So once lunchtime goes past, obviously anything that's a perishable product, now I'm talking sandwiches with ham in it or meat in it, cheese, anything like that, then that's what you want to be disposing of when they get home. And things like yogurts as well, unless they're stable for room temperature, then you want to be throwing them as well. So the things you can keep are any products that you can keep at room temperature. So for example, any baked goods or any packaged products, anything that you would find typically with a best before date on, or for example, if you did make a peanut butter sandwich, for example, then I wouldn't be so concerned about things like that.
Joanne (04:15)
things that wouldn't need to be kept in the fridge if they were separate. It's OK if you put them together as well.
Joanne (04:20)
And we're all trying now to try and, you know, provide our children with a slightly more diverse range of things rather than, you know, I just, literally had a plastic ham sandwich and a bag of cheese and onion crisps for like four years straight at secondary school. And I didn't do this with my own children. So I tried to, give them a slightly more diverse, diverse range of foods and quite a lot of the advice that they send out about healthy lunch boxes involves putting leftovers in, or things like making a cold pasta salad and so on.
So how do those sorts of things keep in a lunchbox? I'm thinking like, you know, say a pasta salad with a bit of cold chicken in it or something like that. What does that affect the rules?
Jenna (04:56)
So no, so it's still cold food essentially. you'd still have like the four hour rule you know, I'd be quite comfortable with that if if it was in a lunchbox again, put an ice pack in it, make it the night before, chill it down as long as the pasta is not hot when it's mixed with the chicken, for example, things like that. ⁓ and it's actually a pasta salad. It's actually a cold product and you've got the four hours. I would be slightly more concerned if you're sending in hot food to school. So depending on how well you can keep it hot or how long you can keep it hot for.
Joanne (05:24)
So things like food flasks, if you wanted to have soup or a curry or something in a food flask, how does that work?
Jenna (05:30)
So when you've got hot food, you want to make sure that you can keep it hot. So you can use a food flask. Now there's certain ways you can keep that food hotter for longer in a food flask. . You want to make sure that that food flask is actually full of food that will actually keep it hot. So if it's only half full, then the food flask won't be working to its full ability. And then you should use any hot food within two hours, which is a problem. Children start school at half eight in the morning and they may not be eating their lunch until half past 12. That's a long time that that food is potentially sitting there if you've heated it up before they go.
Joanne (06:02)
So would you err on the side of not sending hot food?
Jenna (06:04)
yes, definitely. Unless you're looking at filling up an entire food flask, know, things like that's why soups hold really well. They hold their heat really well. I have got some tips on my page about how you can send in hot food if you want to. But again you want to make sure that you're if you are sending in hot food, it's eaten within two hours.
Joanne Roach (06:25)
So that was quite a quick interview, but hopefully it will be a good nudge as you start planning the back to school run up, to remember to pick up some of those drinks or yogurts that you can freeze or to check that your ice packs are still in one piece.
In the interview Jenna mentioned that she has a lot of posts about this topic on her Instagram. And I will link to some of those posts in the show notes about how to keep foods cool, how to prep ahead lunches and what you can freeze, and some posts about hot foods.
Between when I interviewed Jenna and now, there was a bit of a trend on social media of people putting cooked chicken nuggets into food flasks and Jenna did two experiments on them to see if this was safe or not. Spoiler alert, they don't stay hot enough. She has created some posts about this, as well as a couple of posts about the kinds of foods that are more likely to keep their temperature in flasks, if you're in one of those phases where hot food is more appealing to your child, but school dinners are not an option for you.
I'll be back with another episode on Thursday with the end of the month regular roundup of how to cook, store, freeze and use up different categories of food and this month is all about courgettes and other summer squashes. So I hope to see you then, and in the meantime, happy eating.
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