225BatonRouge.com

Last week’s Spatula Diaries blog listed ways to make lunch boxes healthier and more interesting, suggesting to readers to move away from a common reliance on processed, packaged foods in favor of fresh produce and homemade comestibles. Baton Rouge’s Whole Foods Market wrote in to remind us of their affiliation with The Lunch Box, a national project to help schools and parents navigate their way through nutrition. This helpful link supplies parents with a nutrition wheel that shows the numbers of servings kids should be eating within each food group.

Other readers responded with interesting stories about how they’d upped the creative ante on lunches prepared their children. Ann Marie Blackmon takes inspiration from the Bento box, turning to websites like J-Box and Everything Mom for ideas and equipment on assembling artfully prepared bites of this and that. “It was loads of fun,” she said. We ordered cute stuff from Japan and my daughter often helped me make them.” The trend isn’t confined to children. Lap Top Lunches is aimed at adults looking for ideas about making lunch an aesthetic, satisfying experience.