I recently packed the items below for my daughters' lunches and they loved them. I made them at around 9pm the night before, whereas I usually make them quickly in the mornings, so I had extra time to put into them. I went nuts on the cucumbers, which are easy to cookie-cut as well as their sandwiches, which were like trying to cut through two layers of cardboard and some styrofoam, but I did it! My love was proven to my children through the daisy-shaped stigmata I bore on my palms for the next 24 hours.
As cute as they were, I have to be honest. It was a pain in the hand and it wasted a LOT of food. So if you're on any kind of a budget, i.e. time or money, this is not something you want to commit to. Birthdays, special occasions ... sure! Go for it. Press away. But for every little flower-shaped cucumber that you see in this picture, there was an equal amount of wasted veggie in my trash can. Don't even get me started on how much of that tortilla didn't make the literal cut.
However, the biggest gripe I have about these fancy-shaped lunches is the fact that my kid only ate a fraction of what she normally does all for the sake of aesthetics. My girls can eat - especially when working on a growth spurt. My 11 year old loved the sandwich turned sandwiches, but told me she was really hungry by the time she got home from school. I consider that a bit of a school lunch fail.
In addition, I normally leave most if not all of the skin on their food. Food Nazis can argue it both ways in regards to the safety of such a practice, but I prefer they eat the skin of their fruits and veggies for the potential fiber they get from it. It also fosters a level of food acceptance that I feel is important for kids to have. I don't want my kid to go to someone else's house and turn their nose up at dish full of delicious homestyle mashed potatoes because of the 'brown stuff in there' (also known as tater skin). That's diminishing their quality of life because few things on Earth are more delicious than homestyle baked potatoes, but more importantly, IT'S RUDE. The health and social benefits of eating WHOLE foods is significant as far as I'm concerned, so to purposely go to the extra trouble to remove that from their food in the name of "happy shapes" is, in my opinion, just silly.
So in conclusion, I'm not anti-cookie cutter. I'm not a shape hater. I'm just not a huge fan and I have no plans to make "tortilla de Tejas" a regular part of their lunch. Rather, that will be their reward for making it to another birthday, or being Student of the Week or some other meaningful allusion to their awesomeness. However, on all those other days that end in "Y", I will continue to provide them with multi-colored, whole, natural foods that represent all four food groups as I have for the past 9 years. They have eaten about 97% of their lunches in the shapes they naturally came in and none of them are worse off for it. My love has never been brought into question because I failed to provide them with food shaped like Valentines. I think the silly eCards they found in the side pocket sharing poems about bacon got the message across just fine.
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