Lunchables Are Poison

Food Matters

As I started thinking about and writing this piece, I realized that preparing and serving nourishing food has been a foundational essential in my understanding of what’s important in raising a family. It got me thinking about the other elements that I consider foundational essentials. I’m planning to do a mini-series on these essentials. Let’s consider this the first in that mini-series (which may or may not appear consecutively).

Did you read the recent news report condemning Lunchables, the ubiquitous “food kit” that’s been adopted in the National School Lunch Program across the U.S.? (I’m assuming you know what Lunchables are, but maybe you don’t. Lunchables are a collection of items, like say, ham slices, cheese slices, and crackers, with each food-adjacent item sequestered from the others in a hard plastic tray, the whole covered with more plastic. Some have cookies or grapes too. There are different “flavors” of Lunchables; for example, Pizza Lunchables consist of a couple of doughy discs, a plastic container of tomato sauce, and shredded cheese.)

I first became aware of Lunchables in grocery stores in the early 1990s when my oldest sons were very young. A couple of years later, kids we carpooled with had a Lunchable at all times. A lot of people appreciated the convenience.

Lunchables made the news recently because Consumer Reports’ researchers analyzed two kinds of Lunchables used in the School Lunch Program and 12 store-bought renditions. Several of the Lunchables tested contained the heavy metals cadmium and lead, phthalates from plastic, and too-high levels of sodium. That last transgression—too much salt—seems almost quaint compared to the other unwelcome ingredients, even though children eating too much salt can experience high blood pressure, heart disease, and even stroke; at the very least, they develop a taste for something that can set them up for those kinds of cardiovascular problems in later life.

But cadmium and lead! Ouch! No amount of lead in children is considered safe. That’s why we have a nearly 50-year ban on lead in residential paint. Even low levels of lead in young ones can negatively affect their ability to learn, their growth and development, and their hearing, speech, and behavior. And there’s no antidote or cure for elevated lead levels. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the best way to deal with lead poisoning in children is to prevent it.

Exposure to the heavy metal cadmium can adversely affect the kidneys, liver, heart, and nervous system, and even if that exposure occurs in childhood, it can have negative effects on individual adult health. And phthalates, chemicals found in plastic, have been linked to reproductive problems, respiratory issues, diabetes, and certain cancers. Yum!

We don’t have effective ways of dealing with exposure to these toxins, and yet they show up in our precious children’s so-called food. It seems a reasonable assumption that something marketed as food, cutely named after a particular meal (Lunchables!) and served in school cafeterias to 30 million children, would be edible. How does it happen that a “food” we pay hard-earned money for is actually poison?

Well, clearly, the corporations that feed us—Kraft Heinz is the maker of Lunchables—don’t care about us. They’re not our parents, they’re not our friends. They’ll do whatever it takes, they’ll shortcut, circumvent, evade, dodge, and shirk, in order to sell more product. One would hope that the government, in this case the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which okayed the sale of Lunchables in schools, would be paying more careful and cautious attention to our children’s health and wellness. But the USDA, like so many government entities, serves megacorporations, not the people whose taxes fund them, so they’re not going to be our savior here.

As a young mother, I was absolutely dedicated to avoiding overly processed foods. (That’s been a theme throughout my adult life.) I used some processed foods, such as flour, but I’m talking here about stuff with ingredients that are unidentifiable. I had (and have) a policy about avoiding those things. There were several reasons for that—health, caretaking, community building and family strengthening, and modelling.

To be honest, my family of origin emphasized real, whole foods, but we also always had Tang, Nestle Quik, and Ritz crackers in the house. I loved that stuff, and it was part of my daily life. It was when I was pregnant with my oldest son that I started really thinking about what I was eating. Here I was, a person growing inside of me, and I wanted him to have every health advantage. So I didn’t eat sugar or drink caffeine or alcohol. I was living in Italy during that pregnancy in the late 1980s, and every Tommaso, Luigi, and Sofia smoked. I would ask them please to put out the cig because I was pregnant. My point is not to prove my righteousness, but to demonstrate my discipline. I took this stuff seriously.

My main motivation was health-related. There are so many health issues that we can’t control; I felt strongly about trying to control those that I could. That informed my understanding of nourishing my young family. At that time, I considered nutrition the number one factor. (Now I’d add movement and time spent outdoors to that for a power triad.) And so, my emphasis was on whole foods, prepared to taste good without excessive salt or sweeteners. Does this sound fanatical? I recognize that this is not everybody’s thing, and that some people really are so pressed for time that takeout pizza is like a gift from the gods, but there are as many ways to address how we nourish ourselves as there are households and families. I was always after nourishment, not simply fuel. I’m sharing my thinking here, not trying to judge.

I also believe that serving nutritious food is a basic caretaking task; it’s a way for me to show you that I care about you and your wellness. I always made a big pot of chicken soup whenever any of the children was sick because I genuinely think it’s good for what ails you. It tastes like caregiving, it’s a bowl of hot love. I hope that every meal cooked and served communicated that.

Gathering nightly at the dinner table has gotten a lot of attention in recent years as a positive influence on physical health, mental health, and spiritual health. I believe it strengthens families to gather, and because dinner happens every night, it’s a natural moment for gathering. I also think it builds community. When there’s a family dinner happening every night, it’s easy to fold in the kids’ friends, neighbors, or people who drop by. Then what we’re doing—in terms of wellness—has a multiplier effect. Practicing conversation over dinner is an important socializing exercise for everyone. My daughter told me that she and her boyfriend went out to dinner recently. Another couple arrived at the restaurant after they did. The young man positioned himself to face the TV, and the young woman descended into her phone. My daughter says they didn’t say a word during the meal, just slurped their food and exited. My daughter and her beau noticed and discussed how that happens that a couple can spend a dinner in complete silence, attending only to their respective technologies; they theorized that it might have to do with how a person is raised and what dinner meant in the house he or she grew up in.

For me, one of the most important things I served up with those meals was a model—of how you turn fresh foods into dinner, how you pause to say grace before eating to acknowledge your good fortune at having something to eat, and how you create a convivial space. I remember years ago when a friend of my oldest son was over for dinner; the two of them were in the kitchen with me, ostensibly to help. My son’s friend, when faced with a head of lettuce, didn’t know how to make a salad. Yikes. I would call that a pretty foundational life skill, and one that you should have locked down by the time you’re 11 or 12. This boy was 17.

Decades ago, I heard this slogan constantly: Think globally, act locally. Author and social genius Wendell Berry deconstructed that idea in an essay ages ago, arguing that humans are incapable of “thinking globally.” It’s just too enormous a precept to have any actual meaning for us. I believe that nourishing the people in our families, our neighborhoods, and our broader communities is a fine way to act locally. It shifts the responsibility for something basic and essential into our hands and out of the clutches of Kraft Heinz and its ilk.