Tom Arnold is tired of sandwiches. Variety is the key to a good school lunchbox, writes his dad Hugo Arnold
The new school term has started, and I am making resolutions. While Tom is worrying about his spellings, I am concerned about the contents of his lunch box. Not ham again, he groans, and I can see his point. Lord Sandwich has a lot to answer for.
I am determined to move beyond bread, particularly the pappy sliced white he insists on eating. Its chemical cocktail can hardly be helping him to remember the difference between complimentary and complementary.
Tom is nine and his tastes wax and wane. He'll try anything once, just - which for this parent seems quite a good attitude to have - but he's in no doubt what he likes and dislikes. I am no expert on feeding children. And more importantly, no nutritionist.
Yet common sense seems rather important. We all eat with our eyes, and colour is important; so are choice and variety. Ham five days in a row would bore all but the most disinterested diner, regardless of age.
In our food culture we are not that good at culinary choice. If you are lucky, you get a starter and main course, maybe pudding. Lunch on the go is a sandwich. Spain, Morocco, the Middle East, India, Japan - all these nations start with or have complete meals that are a heavenly collection of allsorts, and ideal for placing in a box: tapas, meze, meze again, the thali and, in Japan, the bento box.
One of my favourite cookbook introductions comes from Madhur Jaffrey, when she describes opening her tiffin carrier at school to share with the other children - the myriad different dahls and breads, vegetable dishes of every hue and colour and any number of rices.
Here, we rely too much on manufactured junk in shiny wrappers. But this is a dilemma for all of us. How can we simply ignore what peers are doing? McDonald's gets a low score in our house, but I have no wish to ban it.
Some months ago Tom suggested that instead of his ham sandwich he might take noodles to school. So we got him a flask and went Oriental (his equivalent of a craving for a curry, I suppose). But what shocked me most was how little I had been prepared to think outside the box on his behalf. Stir-fry is one of his favourite suppers, so why not in a lunch box?