I remember it vividly. It was the first day of the school year and a friend of mine (let’s call her Jane) posted this gorgeous photo of her son in his uniform. “First day of Grade 2!”, read the caption.
Cute, I thought.
I swiped across to view the next image – a photo of his lunchbox. The caption: “Nude food lunch box, check!”
My first thought? That looks like SO much work.
My second was the realisation that my son’s lunchbox looks nothing like that (cue a visual of a sandwich in a zip lock bag, a muesli bar in plastic wrapping, a cheese Stringer and some fruit.)
The next time I caught up with Jane I told her how impressed I was with her lunchbox effort.
“I do it every day, everyone does it now. It’s just expected,” she replied.
Jane then explained the ‘nude food’ (i.e. food not wrapped in foil, plastic or commercial packaging) routine she follows to create this lunchbox masterpiece, day in and day out.
“Each morning it takes about five minutes putting it together but at least two hours of my Sunday is spent prepping it. I go to the market to get organic, fresh fruit and veggies, then the rest of the afternoon is spent either preparing the food, cooking or baking what I will need for the week.”
I stood there in shock, and then went home to fact check. Surely this can’t be right, I thought.
Much to my dismay, it was. It is.
It seems almost everyone is on this ‘nude food’ bandwagon, and those on it seem to love posting about it.
Top Comments
It's been a while. Do school-kids nowadays have access to fridges?
As a kid, there is no way I'm going to eat terryakki chicken and eggs festering in my lunch box for several hours in summer and potentially creating new forms of life.
We took turns throwing stuff like that into the bin, the further away the better - it helps explain my exceptional accuracy at hitting 3 pointers in basketball.
I don’t see why this is such a big deal. I thought it was a move to reduce use of plastic and waste? I use this for my kids (who aren’t in school yet), sometimes I have home baked snack, other times it’s straight from the packet - makes it easier for me to have the one lunch box to carry around and one lunch box to wash.
Whether you make food from scratch or it comes from a packet, looks like women can’t win.