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. 3 lunches are in the diary so far, across 3 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 →