Of course, there is also the lesser and embarrassing possibility that a child who refuses to buy lunch is balking at participating in a slow revolution - taking place in some of the more enlightened school cafeterias - that aims to substitute fruits, vegetables and whole-grain food for processed entrees, desserts, and salty or sweet junk food.
No matter the reason, schoolchildren who turn up their noses at the lunches that schools provide will have to carry one there.
Realizing this, my friend Sharon, who must be at a job at 8:30 a.m. and dreads the idea of thinking up and executing meals at any time, spent the months before her son, Alex, entered kindergarten muttering: "Pleasepleaseplease like the school's lunch. Pleasepleaseplease like the school's lunch."
For the many Sharons of the world, packing lunch competes with sex, drugs, the Internet, and endlessly asking "Where did you last see your retainer?" as the most trying aspects of child-rearing.
Fortunately or unfortunately, there is a healthful-lunch bandwagon ready for the boarding. Although the issue of school lunches with a "yuck" factor has been around for decades, more and more school districts are resolving to do something about their healthiness problem.
As they do this difficult work, people like Ann Cooper are reminding parents that healthful eating has to happen in a lunch box, too.
In her new book, Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children (Collins), Cooper, an accomplished chef who has assumed control of the Berkeley, Calif., Unified School District's central kitchen, points out that a growing revolution to reform school cafeterias nationwide can't work without parental involvement.
Parents must pressure the federal government to spend much more than $2 for each lunch and end a reliance on processed food from huge corporations. In addition, parents must begin reforming the food that is prepared in their own homes. This includes take-to-school lunches.
