Some lunchbox alternatives to the favourite ham sandwich
I CAN hear the sound of vegans rejoicing since the WHO announced that eating certain red meats and processed meats can increase your chances of developing colorectal cancer.
Suddenly parents are running wildly to their fridges throwing up their arms and throwing out packets of ham and salami, and, hopefully billy roll.
As a mum of two boys who literally eat me out of house and home, these packets of edible meat-like substances were things I often spent my hard-won money on.
As I wrote more and more about good food, I would stand there watching them making towers of sandwiches from pinky, plasticky stuff and think, surely there has to be another way.
Sadly we don’t have school dinners, but then that might be a good thing, as parents we are responsible for what our children eat so we wouldn’t want them tucking into smiley-faced potato shapes or turkey twizzlers, or would we?
Is it really such a surprise that these things are being declared bad for us?
As teens in school we were brought on a thrilling tour of a sausage factory. To say it turned me off corned beef is an understatement, as buckets of dye and rusk were dumped into a beige paste, churned by a giant mixer then pumped into enormous tins and steamed in huge vats. It made me give up meat for four years.
My teens were a desert devoid of interesting food, brocolli hadn’t been invented yet and a boy in our school was even sent home for smelling of garlic.
Processed meats are made with the parts of the animal that doesn’t resemble the animal any more, 70% meat content means it came from somewhere on an animal’s body.
This minced substance is then mixed with a ton of sugar, pumped with water and salt to bulk it out and finished with a nice dose of nitrates. You know, all that white, frothy stuff that appears when you fry delicious rashers on a pan.
Yum, that’s all those things. When people give meat the red flag, it’s a sad thing that all meat is murdered with the same brush.
For sure, we don’t need to eat meat at every meal but really it’s where our meat comes from that we should be thinking about.
I know we’ve all been hearing that we should buy designer chickens and free-range beef and pork for years, the organic elite telling us smugly how it should be done.
As a person who enjoys both sides of the fence, as likely to be running across the Burren chasing a free range lamb as wolfing a doner kebab on Saturday night, the key to all things is that boring old word: Moderation.
If you don’t want to eat these foods then don’t, and easy alternatives are on the horizon.
My local butchers shop O’Connells in Limerick make Limerick Ham (famous I hear) from scratch, using single joints of ham and everyday ingredients in the curing process.
Many packet hams are made from compressed cuts of different beasts, and let’s not even go there with the chicken goujons. A good butcher’s shop will roast and sell beef and pork by the slice, the above mentioned shop has a queue outside most days as the alluring smells of real meat roasted and sliced appeal to shoppers and die-hard lovers of real food.
Chances are most of the pork you consume is from commercially reared pigs, however, who don’t get to lead the best lives. If you want to splash out, find some good free-range meat, buy the cheaper cuts and get creative in the kitchen.
As a nation of parents that are so dependent on sticking a slice of pink stuff between two slices of packet bread, the question is what now?
I solve our own packet ham problem by roasting two whole free-range chickens at a time and using them for lunches. We might eat one for dinner and the other one gets disembowed and taken to school for nibbles. A chicken drumstick and thigh has a lot more protein that a slab of salami.
But it’s not just meat that we can eat, there are so many ways to fill your little ones tums.
Fussy eaters are just normal kids who eat fussy because they are given the same foods time and again.
Salty, processed meats are highly addictive too. To vary things a little why not try making extra dinner and giving them some to take to school in a tub?
It’s easy to find a nice wide-neck thermos from a shop, you can fill this with some stew, a chunky soup or some leftover pasta with, em, meatballs in tomato sauce.
Brown bread and cheddar cheese with a banana and an apple makes a good lunch box, as does a tub of hummus and some carrot sticks. Lots of kids like raw veg much more than cooked as they are sweet and crunchy.
It’s important that we don’t all run screaming from meat — go back to the butchers, buy from someone who can stand by their products.
My sixteen-year old son’s signature snack is a packet of instant noodles, cooked. He then thickly butters two slices of white bread and pours the noodles on top of the bread, pressing down the second slice on top so that he has a huge, hot, buttery pile that noodles fall out of while he chows down, ah but he loves it.
And it’s not processed meat so I guess its ok then?
