When I was eight, a fairly standard packed lunch for little Nell was a falling-apart cheese and brinjal pickle sandwich, a tartan thermos of juice, and a handful of sunflower seeds that one of my parents would simply toss into my lunchbox before slamming it shut. And yet, last night, I watched a pair of perfectly manicured hands carve daisies out of an egg. A hard-boiled egg. That’s right: a sulphuric, sewer-smelling flower made of unfertilized ovum. Yum. A few minutes later, I gawked at someone trimming a cheese sandwich into the shape of a butterfly before sticking googly eyes on it. They paired this with an over-engineered kiwi and a piece of processed cheese with star-shaped holes punched through the middle. I say the following in a spirit of loving kindness: Instagram has left us all a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
Along with the parents of about 9,092,072 other UK pupils, I’m waving my son off to a new school year this week, and lo, my Instagram feed is suddenly stiff with highly curated photoshoots of uniforms, book bags, front doors, school shoes, and, of course, lunchboxes. Whether it’s a “back-to-school” hairstyle for a four-year-old or a monogrammed satchel bouncing down a leafy street, this whole September aesthetic makes me feel woefully like an outsider. As both the daughter and wife of a teacher (different ones—I didn’t actually marry my mother), my aspirations for a good start of term are that the children are safe, on time, preferably clean, and hopefully fed. This, as we all know, is in no way a given for many children across the country. Neither breakfast, nor access to a bathroom, nor a safe journey to school is guaranteed for kids from low-income, vulnerable, or otherwise marginalized families—and, for many parents, color co-ordinating their child’s socks with the school gates is about as far-fetched as planning a trip to the moon.
When it comes to my own son, I’m very lucky to be able to pack him spare clothes, brush his teeth in our own sink, and give him an extremely dentist-unfriendly bowl of cereal before his first day back. I did not post a photo of him outside our enormous and landscaped front garden—firstly, because I worry about the safety of broadcasting where we live to potentially millions of strangers, and secondly, because I don’t have one. I did not buy him new clothes especially for the start of term (we get hand-me-downs from a taller boy who lives in my mother-in-law’s building). And I did not make him a packed lunch full of edible bunnies and pinwheels. He will eat government-funded free school meals, as every child in his year in England is entitled to.
Which brings me on to the real point, I suppose. I don’t particularly mind parents spending hours filming themselves as they create edible masterpieces in specially selected containers. Whatever gets you through the week. But I would love there to be as much social media commentary about the need for free school meals everywhere as there is #lunchboxideasforkids. If there were free school meals for all children, it would improve the health of the next generation and force tax-avoiding businesses to admit that they’d rather children starve than pay towards funding a national program of food provision.