“Parents of gluten free children will have to pack at least 175 lunches (per child) this school year. Our goal is to make sure that the lunches we pack are envied (or at least not scorned) by other (wheat-eating) children, and will be eaten (not traded or thrown away) by the child.” I wish I knew the source of that quotation. It sums up up the situation pretty well — I added the words in parentheses to emphasize how this relates to gluten free families.

Fortunately, the internet provides us with plenty of ideas and specific recipes. Start with this general article. It includes a lot of very sensible suggestion of always packing “something extra” in the lunch box. Gluten free children can’t trade food with their classmates, but they give their classmates a taste of their food to to demonstrate that people who live gluten free are not ‘weird’ (or whatever the current term is) and that our food is ‘awesome’ (or whatever that current term is).

Here are two collections of lunch box recipes. Not all the recipes are gluten free, but the necessary substitutions will be fairly obvious. If you don’t already have TMI (Too Much Information), try this article. Older children who can read these posts want to study them and make requests. This will also give them more of a feeling of responsibility for their gluten free lifestyle.

This is the first in a series of articles titled “Gluten Free School Lunches”. On Saturday, I did another article on different aspects of this subject and will continue to write back-to-school articles on Tuesdays and Saturdays for the rest of this month.