CHOW AND TELL
Sayonara, sandwiches and string cheese. Instagram culture is pressuring NYC moms to treat school lunches like works of art — and they’re exhausted
W HEN Meesha Chang makes a bento box lunch for her 2 ½-year-old daughter, Lucia, it isn’t child’s play.
Every weeknight, Chang stays up until 11 rolling tiny rice balls flavored with butter, soy sauce and sesame seeds to appeal to her picky eater. She pokes decorative toothpicks into homemade mini meatballs or dumplings and uses tiny cookie cutters to cut savory pancakes into hearts and stars.
The goal is “to pack every compartment with something that excites her,” the 41-year-old Greenpoint mother and freelance creative consultant tells The Post.
Still, she worries she’s not doing enough — especially when lunch comes home intact. Recently, Chang asked another mom about her meal-packing strategy and was shocked to learn that it entailed a salami quesadilla, fish sticks and mac ’n’ cheese in a single lunchbox.
“It made me feel bad, ’cause I haven’t been giving her that kind of variety,” she says. “Now I’m thinking I have to add a lot more mains and have her be able to pick and choose.”
The modern age’s obsession with wholesome food, the growing popularity of Japanese bento box containers in the US and Instagram one-upmanship have converged to turn children’s lunches into an intensely competitive, timeconsuming mom sport. And those who dare to haphazardly toss a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, some browning apple slices and a few chips into a brown paper bag risk being viewed as parental failures.
Chang says she follows several Instagram accounts
— such as @yumboxlunch, a bento box company that often highlights crafty mothers’ work on its feed — for inspiration. But often, she finds them anything but motivating.
“It’s kind of frustrating to see their posts,” says Chang. “I can’t really recreate [them] . . . It’s not realistic for me.”
Some of the moms showcasing their bento boxes on Instagram admit it’s timeconsuming. Chloé Gottlieb, a mother of one and preschool director who is passionate about getting the toddler set to eat well, regularly showcases her 2-year-old daughter’s meals on her Instagram account, @childrenshealthylifestyles. She estimates that she spends four to five hours prepping for the lunches at the beginning of the week, plus another 15 to 30 minutes each morning.
“Oh my goodness,” she says. “So much [time].”
Gottlieb, 34, who lives in downtown Manhattan and has worked in early childhood education for a dozen years, says she’s definitely seen midday kiddie meals get fancier.
“The lunches are more elaborate,” she says, noting that she sees tots packing everything from sushi to rice and beans. “Before it was a simple bag lunch, it was a lot of sandwiches. Now, it’s a lot of bento boxes.”
The sectioned containers have long been popular with school children in Japan, where mothers go to great lengths to make adorable, appetizing lunches. In recent years, they’ve become trendy in the US — they’re sold everywhere from Urban Outfitters to Pottery Barn — due to their being photogenic and environmentally responsible, says Wendy Thorne Copley, author of “Everyday Bento: 50 Cute and Yummy Lunches to Go” (Tuttle Publishing).
She doesn’t think they necessarily have to encourage mom-petitions, though: “If you have just a little bit of food left over from dinner, you can put it in your lunchbox the next day along with whatever else is in your fridge.”
Table scraps are a canvas for Lauren Costello, a professional cook and former food stylist who transforms leftovers into lunches for her two sons, ages 7 and 12.
“I definitely send them [to school] with a lot of things that people would think of more as dinner,” she says. One night’s spaghetti and meatballs turns into the next day’s cheesy baked pasta lunch, while some spare chicken gets repurposed as a lettucecup filler.
With her younger son, she’ll still get cutesy, cutting sandwiches into shapes. With her older son, she fusses less, but makes sure the food is still fabulous. Once, she says, he was called into the principal’s office during lunchtime, and the head of school remarked on his meal — mango-curry chicken salad on homemade challah bread, with baby spinach.
“They all get jealous,” says the 43-year-old.
But Costello is quick to note that this sort of thing comes easily to her as a professional chef and she genuinely enjoys doing it.
“I don’t see it as a competitive thing,” says Costello, who lives in Westport, Conn., and doesn’t typically Instagram her school lunches.
Other parents are outsourcing their lunch shifts.
Lainie Gutterman, 45, says her 6-year-old daughter, Greenlee, loves vegetables, even though Gutterman herself isn’t health-obsessed and has a sweet tooth.
“She literally will put down french fries and ice cream for kale,” she says. “My daughter is going to be the next Gwyneth Paltrow.”
Gutterman doesn’t really cook — so, every day, she buys Greenlee lunch from Little Beet, Dig Inn, By Chloe or Fresh & Co.
It costs about $15 per meal, but the Manhattan stay-at-home mom says it’s worth it.
“I know I’m sending in a lunch my daughter looks forward to, enjoys, will devour,” she says. “I don’t have to feel guilty that I’m feeding her crap.”
Chang, meanwhile, is always on the search for lunch items her daughter will actually eat — but she’s trying not to stress about it so much. She says one helpful piece of advice she recently received was to focus on healthy breakfasts and dinners, and not spend so much time and money packing the bento box each day.
“I’m not going to give her filet mignon for lunch,” she says. “She’s not going to eat it.”
They all get jealous . . . I don’t see it as a competitive thing.” — Lauren Costello, a mom of two, on the elaborate school lunches she packs for her boys