Firefly Fellow Dr Brittany Johnson’s research is sparking conversations about healthier school food and making mornings easier for families.
Meet Dr Brittany Johnson, Firefly Children Foundation’s newly announced Fellow, whose research is exploring how Australia could rethink the way we feed children at school.
Brittany is investigating the potential for school-provided meals to improve children’s health and wellbeing, while making life a little easier for busy families. But her research isn’t just something she talks about in an academic setting – it’s also influencing what happens around the family lunchbox.
Her sister Michaela has two very special reasons to take an interest in Brittany’s work: her children, Addi, 5 and Jace, 3, pictured with Brittany. We caught up with Michaela to find out what packing school lunches is really like – and how having a nutrition researcher in the family has changed the way they approach the lunchbox.
The daily lunchbox challenge
The research hits close to home for Michaela. She knows only too well the daily challenge of packing a lunchbox that is nutritious, appealing and actually gets eaten.
“When they first started school after coming from day care where food was provided, it was really hard to know how much to pack,” Michaela says. “You don’t want them getting hungry, but you also don’t want food going to waste – and their appetites and preferences are constantly changing.”
Fruit is usually an easy win, but vegetables can be trickier. Knowing how important they are to Brittany’s research, Michaela encourages her children to have some every day – even giving vegetables their own special spot in their lunchboxes.
“If they want a ham and cheese or Vegemite and cheese sandwich, they know they need to have some veggies on the side, like cherry tomatoes or mushrooms,” she says.
And when encouragement doesn’t work, there’s always a little help from Auntie Britt – or a favourite book, Vegetable Glue, the quirky, award-winning children’s picture book by Susan Chandler that encourages healthy eating through a humorous story.
“We use Britt as a motivator to persuade them to eat their veggies,” Michaela laughs.
“Or we talk about Vegetable Glue – we don’t want their bums to fall off!”
Taking the pressure off families
For Michaela, the idea of school-provided lunches is appealing for another reason: it could take some of the pressure off busy families.
“It would be amazing,” she says. “We’ve seen the peer influence at day care, where the kids would eat things they might not have eaten at home. School-provided meals could also offer seasonal food, like hot meals in winter, which can be harder to pack in a lunchbox.”
And perhaps the biggest benefit?
“It would be one less thing to worry about when you’re trying to get the kids off to school before work.”
