Isn't the aim of the lunchbox to make sure that children eat?

British mother Anna Maxted on the research that shows that most parents fail to comply with nutritional standards when they make their children's lunchboxes

Every morning I sling the same four items into the seven-year old's lunchbox and feel like a rotten mother. From Monday to Friday throughout term, my son eats the same boring, nutritionally suspect lunch: Marmite sandwich, yoghurt drink, carton of juice, Shape bar.

I am in bad company, as it turns out that ninety nine per cent of British mothers are equally slack in regard to their darlings' diet. Research at Leeds University – out this week in an associate publication of the British Medical Journal – finds that if nutritional standards were applied to packed lunches, only one per cent would comply. Of the 1,300 seven and eight-year olds surveyed, more than a quarter had a lunchbox containing sweets, crisps and a sugary drink. Only one in ten had a portion of vegetables.

The nanny state is, of course, alert to the fact that we slipshod parents will feed our kids any cheap fatty rubbish. The School Food Trust (slogan: Eat Better, Do Better), established by the Department of Education and Skills in 2005, actually provides "menus to help parents" who are seemingly incapable of filling a lunchbox without adding Haribos. This term, my sons' school newsletter issues a stern reminder that "children should not bring sweets or chocolates in their packed lunch".

The truth: we slapdash mothers have begged, then forced, our children to trot to school with a flask of home-made broccoli soup, tomatoes, a banana, an organic flapjack, a peanut butter sandwich on granary bread, dried chopped apricots and a peach smoothie.

The following morning, we retrieve the lunchboxes from the hallway floor to find: a bruised yet untouched banana, squashed tomatoes, spat-out apricot. The soup flask has been opened and promptly shut, but not fully, and has leaked. The flapjack, lovingly baked at midnight, is crumbled into a thousand pieces. Even the peanut butter sandwich has failed. "We're not allowed nuts," the seven-year old informs me crossly. "I got told off."

The no-nut policy also rules out the organic Bombay mix I discovered while frantically scouring the health food store for non-harmful, government approved ingredients. I don't want to give my seven-year old a Shape bar (7g of sugars in 21g), but the Granola bar was rejected by the food police on no-nut grounds too – "Mrs Kent said I had to eat it at home time." Furiously, I checked the packet. The Granola contains "traces" of almond and hazelnut. The Shape bar only contains fructose, dextrose, sugar, sorbitol and glycerol, so it's permitted.

I surrendered to the Cheese String – but that fad ran its course. Organic yoghurt tubes are rejected as "babyish". The five-year-old is just as picky. The only way I can sneak fruit into his lunchbox is via the extortionate Innocent "Squeezie" – £2.19 for a few squirts of mango puree – and an Ella's Kitchen "squished organic fruit" pouch. If I chance a satsuma, it remains uneaten, desperate fingernail marks in its peel telling a sad tale of failure and frustration.

It was all so different, of course, when the first child started reception. We parents were half-crazed with optimism. One Japanese mother I know would rise at dawn to make fresh sushi. Another friend had her four-year-old schlep in daily with half an avocado plus bottle of vinegarette. This regime lasts until the child claps eyes on a Hula-Hoop.

Last week, in desperation, I scanned the online list of lunchbox ideas by children's cook Annabel Karmel, and wanted to cry; Spanish omelette? Chicken Caesar salad? Sign on back saying "kick me"? And before anyone mentions hummus, know this: unless you want your children to be bullied, don't send them to school with food that smells.

Dietician Dr Sarah Schenker, of the British Nutrition Foundation, knows, despite the alleged evidence, that most parents yearn to trick their angels into eating the nutritionally perfect lunch – even pouring Cornflakes into a plastic bag and trying to pass them off as crisps – but that we inevitably have to compromise. "You can make a packed lunch super healthy but if it's coming back untouched, that is more serious than if something has been eaten that is not your ideal choice," she says.

This morning, staring dolefully at its meagre contents, I ask Oscar, "is there anything I can add to your lunchbox?" and he replies no, thank you, that he is "the fastest" at eating his lunch.

The government is perhaps unaware that when you are seven, it is less important to be full than to be finished. They may also be ignorant of the fact that when our poor, malnourished children return home, they gorge on grapes, carrots, cucumber and apples all evening, without a squeak of protest.

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Farmed windpipe transplanted in crash victim

A very interesting new procedure



A WOMAN whose windpipe was crushed in a car crash has had it replaced with an implant that was farmed in her arm. For more than 25 years Linda De Croock lived with the constant pain of having two metal stents propping open her windpipe, Sky News reports. That was until the Belgian found a doctor, Pierre Delaere, on the internet who was willing to try something new. "I had always wondered, so many things are possible, why not a new windpipe?" Ms De Crook said.

Dr Delaere and his colleagues, who had performed similar procedures on a smaller scale for cancer patients, agreed to carry out the operation. Once the doctors had a suitable donor windpipe they wrapped it in Ms De Croock's own tissue and implanted it into her lower left arm. There they connected it to a large artery to re-establish the blood flow.

Ms De Croock said having a windpipe in her arm felt strange and uncomfortable. "It was packed in with gauze and my whole arm was in plaster." About 10 months later, when enough tissue had grown around it, the windpipe was transferred to its proper place. Dr Delaere was delighted with the result. "This is a major step forward for trachea transplantation," he said.

Ms De Croock said the operation had transformed her life. "Life before my transplant was becoming less livable all the time, with continual pain and jabbing and pricking in my throat and windpipe," she explained, adding that she no longer even needs to take anti-rejection drugs.

The way doctors at Belgium's University Hospital trained her body to accept donor tissue could yield new methods of growing or nurturing organs within patients, experts say.

Patrick Warnke, a tissue-engineering expert at Bond University in Australia, said it was the first time a donor organ as large as the trachea was nurtured inside the recipient's own body before being transplanted. "This shows us that we may one day be able to use patients' own bodies as bioreactors to grow their own tissue," he said.

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