Keeping Lunch Safe

I'm starting this post with Cliffs Notes in case you can't stand paragraph after paragraph of my lunchbox ramblings and such:

-Igloo Mini Tote 8 Fits a Goodbyn Bento perfectly while keeping it horizontal
-There's plenty of room for water bottle and snack, too.
-It also keeps the food very cool and safe (see the last photo)

But if you're interested in lunch box ramblings, then hey, thanks for sticking it out with me.

I'll admit, I looked like a fool in Target when back-to-school time came.  In search of the perfect lunch solution, I headed over to the lunch box section and made myself comfy, trying to fit different bento styles into different lunch boxes.  It's a far cry from the days of my childhood where we all carried the same hard-sided Aladdin-brand lunch boxes with matching thermoses with our favorite TV characters on them--or brown paper bags.  You know what I'm talking about, right?  There are just so many choices and the reviews found on the internet only further throw me into obsessiveness in making "just the right choice".  It comes in part from just wanting to have the perfect solution and also, I really want to buy something that works and not have to buy anything again for a long time.

All that leads me to say that for the Goodbyn Bento, the Igloo mini tote 8 is a great choice of lunchbox.  Now, initially I chose the Igloo Leftover Tote 9, which is great, but as it would turn out it's rather large and cumbersome for an undersized five-year-old like mine.  I can't tell you how many times we heard "That lunch box is bigger than she is,"--and it was a totally correct statement.  When I ordered the Igloo Leftover Tote 9, I received the wrong item and what was sent was the Igloo Mini Tote 8.  The Amazon seller told me to keep the incorrect item and they'd send the correct one, so I ended up with two lunch boxes--but let me say--their mistake was a huge benefit to me because it helped me get the better lunch box, I just didn't know it yet.

The Goodbyn Bento nestles perfectly down into the Igloo Mini Tote 8.  I place two ice packs on the bottom before I add the Bento, and then I'm able to keep the Bento horizontal which was a requirement for me.  There are SO many lunchbox options if you're not concerned about your Bento going vertical, but I wanted to be able to place silicone muffin liners of multiple items into one of the compartments, so going vertical didn't seem like a great idea in our case.

The Bento fits snugly into the mini tote but can still be easily removed by small children with unrefined motor skills.  There is additional room in the top to hold a snack (including the Goodbyn snack containers) and a good-sized water bottle.  (We switch between a Nalgene kids bottle and a Camelback Kid's Eddy.)

Here's the best part of the lunch box solution.  Call us nerds, but we love our digital surface thermometer.  My husband bought it to measure results of some home improvement projects (insulation and the like) and it turns out, we use it a lot.  I even use it in place of a candy thermometer.  I digress (obviously, since this ENTIRE post is about something as lame as lunchboxes!) but this tool helped me to know that our solution is keeping Elliott's food safe.

The pic on the left shows a bowl of watermelon straight from the fridge at 7:30am.  To the right, this is the measurement of Elliott's leftover watermelon after school.  Mind you, the lunchbox has been removed for a period of time, midday, so that she can eat her lunch--and even still, the temp increase at the end of the day is only 8 degrees. Food safety experts tell us that the "Danger Zone" for food falls between 40-140, so all-in-all I feel like an 8 degree increase over the course of 8 hours is pretty impressive.  

I had to do this checking, you see, because I hate hate hate food waste and if Elliott hasn't finished her lunch, then her lunch leftovers are her afternoon snack when she gets home.  (Some things, even at a decent temp, I don't do this with, however--like leftover egg salad for instance--but in the case of this watermelon and many other leftovers, I feel perfectly fine encouraging her to just eat her leftovers as a snack when she gets home.)  Call me crazy, but do you know how much food Americans throw out every year?  I try to keep our grocery budget minimal and a large way that this is successful is by not wasting food.  Keeping our lunches within a safe temperature range helps a lot, in our case. 

In this case, I'd like to think my obsessiveness in finding the right solution has paid off in a number of ways.