Red Barn Lunch -- what a great idea!

Lots of parents would like a better lunch choice for their school aged kids, but right now the choices are:

• eat whatever is provided in the school cafeteria,
  
• Stop at the local Kroger and pick up something that's a bit better and find the time to pack it
• plan, shop, and find the time to pack a lunch with the highest quality, locally grown, organic foods the kids will eat. That could be a part time job!
  

Just planning for menu that the kids will eat is tricky enough, without finding the time to research and travel all over the region looking for the highest quality, organic foods.

It's been a headache for years for anyone who actually cares about nutrition. As we learn more and more about the effects that food quality has on our kids, it's become a more pressing question.

So, where do we get the best foods for our kids and how do we manage to get them packed into nutritious, kid-friendly lunches five days a week?

Even families who homeschool have to pack something for the weekly homeschool coop meetings and play dates.

Karen Myers has been thinking about this for a while and she has an idea. How cool would it be to have access to a prepacked lunch for each child every day? Not lunchables or takeout, but real, locally grown, traditional foods, grown organically and sustainably and served minimally processed. In serving sizes just right for youngsters, and at a reasonable price!

A few weeks ago, Karen and some friends gave this idea a trial run by providing the lunches for sale at a local "foodies" conference, and it was a hit. Rod and I were excited about the idea and even more excited when we tasted the foods! Wow! For 5 or 6 dollars, we got a lunch that was delicious, generously sized, and easy to store.

So, last week, we attended a planning session for Karen's brainchild, Red Barn Lunch. It turns out that while there were quite a few people in attendance with experience and enthusiasm, the idea hasn't quite jelled yet.

It's pretty clear that there is a market out there, and we had some ideas for ways that we could make the lunches accessible to a wider audience by finding ways to make them available to people with specific dietary needs.

So, how good is the idea? Would you and your family be interested in buying such lunches? If you were interested , what would matter most to your family? What price would be willing to pay per lunch?

Feel free to contact Karen.