The Au Pair's Survival Guide

The danish packed lunch in a lunch box is one of the rituals almost all households with children in Denmark go through every single morning. Preparing the lunch box “madkasse” is one of those tasks that parents often dread, though possibly emptying the uneaten remnants is even worse. It can be hard to maintain both interest of the children aswell as a good nutritional balance. Packing lunch was also one of the first tasks we gladly passed to our au pair, nevertheless, finding interesting sandwich fillings or salads is still a challenge.

With the return to school and work after the summer a whole plethora of food websites are offering their take. So below are some helpful links for ideas for healthy, wholesome packed lunches.

More importantly perhaps is the ethos behind a nutritionally sound lunch. Children need a somewhat different balance of food to adults largely because they are still growing but also because they tend to be much more active than most adults. Along with this, their tastes will be set in childhood but carried over into adulthood. If they eat too much salt, too much sugar and too many processed foods as children, these habits may well have harmful effects later on in life.

The official advice from the Ministry of Education here in Denmark is to include:

• A cereal or other starchy food like bread, rice, potatoes or pasta
• A source of protein foods like meat, fish, eggs or beans
• Some vegetables for children to get their teeth into like raw carrots or cauliflower
• Some dairy such as cheese, yoghurt or milk
• A portion of fruit

The ministry even include some great recipes in the standard handbook parents receive when their children start school. (Downloadable here but it’s written in Danish)

This is a great place to start when thinking about how to plan a lunch box, a ham or fish sandwich for example with some carrot sticks and a piece of fruit and a yoghurt (though be careful with the sugar content of fruit yoghurt which can be very high) or some cubes of cheese (again be wary of packing too many processed cheese snacks which tend to have high levels of salt) is ideal.

School children in Denmark have the option to get school milk delivered to the class room and this is also an excellent way to get a little more protein as well as liquids into their diet.