Arrgg, not tomato - I hate tomato. It's yucky.

As we move inexorably towards the commencement of the school year (18 hours, 11 minutes and counting), my mind turns to the vexed issue of lunch boxes.

Now I don't know about you but those articles that appear in a myriad of printed matter with lunch box suggestions and recipes piss me off.  I am not about to make zuchinni muffins and tuna slice just for lunch boxes.  The worms at the school worm farm are already suffering fatty livers from overfeeding.

Only 40 minutes to prepare, people - the worms will love it.

One of my monsters is almost certain to pass on anything that is not a cheese, hommus and lettuce sandwich.  On a good day, you might get away with substituting green capsicum for lettuce.  Three years ago we started a long war of attrition with a cheese and nothing else samo and we have been fighting in the trenches since.  Great strides, people, great strides.

The other monster will rotate randomly through unwelcome items to be removed and discarded, including any veg, meat, or, in fact, the bread itself.  About the only items certain to be eaten are salami and anything sufficiently coated in tomato sauce.  One day cucumber is verboten, the next day, munched unnoticed.

When I was a child I knew one kid who ate a roll with honey exclusively all the way through primary and high school and another kid in year 10 who was meeting his mother at the school gate at the start of lunch period to pick up his freshly made banana sandwich.  Every school day.  For eleven years.  Personally, I think his mother needed more help than he did*.

Looking back into the dim dark ages I suspect I was just as annoying.  I remember my mother asking if I liked my sandwich one afternoon and I said, "What was it?"  She said, "It was mock chicken - I was trying out the recipe."  "Ah", I said.  "No wonder I couldn't recognise it.  I threw it out."

Of course the monsters dream of a lunch box filled with supermarket lunch box food - crunchy things that pretend they are not chips, grainy bars held together with sugar, and little tubes of "yoghurt" that have a much closer relationship with colour fixers, thickening agents and antioxidants then, say, a cow.

Strap on your helmets, soldiers.  In a another 17 hours and 29 minutes we are going over the top and it's ugly out there.


*Treatment for a rampaging separation anxiety, one assumes.