Occasionally events seem to conspire against us. Next week brings both Friday the 13th and National School Lunch Week, enough to make small children tremble.

        Alas, wrongly so.

        Both are unfairly maligned occasions, steeped in myth and carried along by prejudice. Superstition over Friday the 13th goes back centuries, but the bad rap on cafeteria lunches can be traced to the ketchup-as-vegetable debacle of the 1980s.

        Most likely we continue these myths simply because we like to scare ourselves. But some things aren't as treacherous as they seem.

        I will leave you to your own musings on the Friday matter, but I feel compelled to clear the air on school lunches. As I glance over my daughter's school menu, I am impressed by fresh vegetables and fruits, and the diversity of proteins listed. Yes, I would wish for more whole grains, and I'd nix the hot dogs and add some fish. But the bottom line is this: Far scarier things have issued forth from her own lunch box.

        And those of most other children.

Prepackaged sugar, salt
        I speak here from experience, not suspicion. I'm a longtime and careful observer of children's lunches. Many is the day I have spent in a cafeteria, interviewing young children while they wolfed down food and tried to make a beeline around me for the playground. In 14 years of this, the quality of cafeteria lunches has risen considerably, while the quality of home-packed lunches has fallen drastically.

        Enter the advent of the highly colorful, highly unnatural, prepackaged lunch. Need I say more?

        It is now possible to whip through a grocery store, tossing in bags of individually packaged products — one hesitates to call them food — that can then be simply transferred into a lunch box. The packer hardly gets dirty hands. And because these “meals” include a wealth of sugar, fat and salt, kids actually do eat them.

        I have resorted to this shortcut at times, but it never makes me happy. Like some of you, I carry in my head another vision of the packed lunch, part memory, part fantasy. I hark back to the small plastic containers of grapes and apple slices my mother used to pack, and the real-cheese sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. I dream of a modern-day, refrigerated lunch box with veggies and dip, whole-grain crackers, maybe even a salad.

Too many fat kids
        There are convincing real-life arguments against this, of course. I have made them myself: My kid won't eat it. I don't have time to pack it. Who has that stuff on hand?

        But in the end, these are only excuses, and there are compelling reasons to take seriously the lunches we send. Today, 6 million American children are seriously overweight and 5 million more on the verge of becoming so. Pediatricians report increased numbers of children with elevated blood pressure and cholesterol, and type-2 diabetes. Diet is clearly a culprit.

        Lunches are one-third of our children's diet, no way around it. Packing nutritious ones — tasty enough to eat, but not enticing enough to trade — is a tricky business, but surely there is a solution.

        In the end, as in all of life, all we have is one another. If we lunch-packers stick together and concentrate on healthy stuff, with whom could our children trade?

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