About

Every school morning a box gets packed. This is the record of what went in it.

It started as a photo sent to family and turned into a habit: one picture of the box before the lid goes on, with the contents labelled by hand so nobody has to guess what the orange thing is. 15 lunches are in the diary so far, across 9 kinds of meal.

What goes in

Mostly the food we already eat at home, made portable: keema wraps, momos, arayes, paneer sandwiches, a lot of pasta. There is usually something warm, something fresh, and one thing that exists purely to be negotiated with. Nuts go in a separate tin when they go in at all, and every entry says whether the box was nut-free.

How it gets packed

Nothing here takes more than half an hour, and most of it takes twenty minutes. That is only possible because of Sunday: sauces cooked down, pizza bases frozen, compote made in one batch. The prep time on each entry is the morning-of time, not the whole story.

Packed fresh, five mornings a week. Browse the archive →