For those Warriors looking to spend a little less on lunch every week, maybe try packing your own. In a recent survey asking about the best lunch options both on and off campus, (If you haven’t already, take the survey here) only 28.6 percent of Warriors said they pack lunch consistently, the exact same amount as the number of responders who said that they never bring their own lunch.
Eating lunch you pack yourself gives you a little more flexibility. If you do follow my advice and make your own sandwich, you could butter both sides and add some cheese, slather the buns with mayonnaise and add some cold sliced turkey, or, for the sweet-tooths out there, you could even spread some nutella on both slices of bread, add some bananas, and call it a day.
Making lunch yourself is a lot easier on the wallet than eating at any restaurant everyday, a sentiment echoed by almost every response in the survey. Almost everyone who ate off-campus more than three times a week spent at least $20 a week!
“With Starbucks just about every day mixed with outside food I usually spend about 50-60 a week. I’m trying to keep the spending closer to ten dollars a day.” Said one responder.
Nearly everyone that said they packed their own lunch felt the opposite, often citing cheaper prices as one of the main reasons that they chose to eat a homemade meal, “because it’s a lot of money to buy lunch every day…”
I know that finding time in the mornings to pack your own lunch is a unique kind of scheduling challenge. Do you set the alarm ten minutes earlier and miss out on sleep, or do you hit the snooze button and scramble to put together a passable lunch? Take it from me, rolling out of bed earlier than I want to and shortening my blissful showers in the morning just for a measly sandwich sounds like too much effort to justify.
Making your own food gives you the flexibility to eat where you want to, be that in the library, outside, in the cafeteria, or anywhere else around the school. Avoiding the long lines across the street allows you more time to talk with your friends, an invaluable part of daily high school life.
You don’t even have to put in the effort to make your own lunch every day. If you wake up in the morning craving that Shawarma wrap or Chipotle burrito, treat yourself. You’re not breaking a lunch-from-home code if you go across the street during the lunch hour on occasion.
If you make a sandwich yourself, you know exactly what goes in there. After all, it takes effort to put together a good one. If you order something, however, your food might have a lot of unhealthy oil or butter added to it that you just don’t know about. Making lunch also lets you get more greens in your diet, or other such healthy food. There’s a reason that everyone in the survey mentioned the healthiness of making their own lunch when asked why. Having confidence in the food you eat is important, and one of the easiest ways to feel confident about what you eat is to make it yourself.
So, maybe try to wake up that small bit earlier in the morning. Crack open that jar of mayonnaise, that tub of nutella, that bottle of mustard. Make a sandwich.
