While on campus, Notre Dame students love to hate on the dining halls — the food is repetitive, the meat is somewhat questionable, and the fruit selection is limited. Once we all return home, however, we quickly remember the one thing that is undeniably nice about the DH: it’s absolutely convenient.
During the summer, we can no longer head over the DH to grab a quick lunch between classes, and we aren’t guaranteed a variety of food at every meal. If we’re living at home, we might once again have the advantage of daily home cooked meals, but this likely doesn’t translate to every meal we have to find. Likely, we are on our own for breakfast and lunch.
For those working or interning this summer, lunch can bring about a bit of a conundrum. At first, the easiest option seems to be to purchase lunch at a nearby restaurant or cafe. The food is likely pretty good, and we don’t have to worry about it. But this can pretty quickly wear on the wallet, and eating out every day isn’t the healthiest option. So to save cash, the best solution is to make a return to the K-12 days and start packing a lunch.
Packing a lunch for work is fairly similar to packing it for school, but there is no longer a parent around to purchase all of the food or to make sure that the meal is correctly balanced. But with these three tips, anyone can start packing work lunches like a pro!
1. Invest in a new lunchbox, preferably a Bento box
Brown bagging it may seem like the cheapest option, but an actual bag won’t keep your food as fresh as a sealed box will. The advantage of the Bento box is that it will not only seal your food to keep it nice until you need it for your lunch break, but it helps compartmentalize your food to make sure you’re bringing something besides a turkey sandwich. With at least three boxes, you make sure that you cover at least three different foods (and if you’re thinking about it, you can pretty easily diversify your food groups!).
2. Plan ahead
It feels a bit silly to make a plan on Sunday for what you will eat on Friday — but it’s actually one of the easiest ways to decrease your stress during the week. If you’ve got a plan all written up and ready to go, you don’t have to think about the morning of. Rather, you just wake up, check your planning sheet, and get it packed, no extra stress needed. This is especially helpful if you accidentally sleep through your 6:30 a.m. wake up call. You already know what you need and the process is twice as fast. If you’re worried about making it, you can even be extra prepared and pack the lunch the night before.
3. Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest!
It can be so easy to get stuck in a routine. Two weeks in and you run out of new ideas for lunches — and end up making the same three meals every day on rotation. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but even peanut butter and jelly gets old after the thirtieth time. Checking out ideas on Pinterest is a great way to find new ways to experiment with your typical lunchtime routine. Just look up lunch ideas and there are hundreds of examples to steal from.
The HCND application is now open! For more information contact Rebecca Rogalski at rrogalsk@nd.edu or Katrina Linden at klinden1@nd.edu.
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