The teacher sent a note home from preschool: Please don’t send big sandwiches in your kids’ lunches. Send a variety of foods in small portions, and please don’t use those non-recyclable plastic baggies. Ashley Leake and Misty Quinn, whose little ones were classmates, took the request to heart. So they set out to find proper containers for their kids’ lunches. But they never could find just the right thing. That’s when they got the idea for their business, My Square Meal, which produces compartmented lunch boxes based on the Japanese bento box. The lunchboxes come with cute carrying cases, which are sewn in Dallas and embroidered at Keep U N Stitches on Buckner. They cost about $35-$40, and each one comes with a list of lunch ideas. “What we encourage parents to do is go through these lunch ideas with their children and let their children take part in deciding what they eat for lunch,” says Leake, who lives in Lakewood. That helps them learn about portion control and making healthy choices. Plus, kids are more likely to eat a lunch they picked out themselves. Leake and Quinn started selling the lunchboxes in 2009, and they sell to people across the nation on their website, mysquaremeal.com. The lunchboxes are in more than a dozen boutiques, including Bebe Grand in the Lakewood Shopping Center. The lunchboxes are good for kids in preschool as they are easy to open, and there’s only one lid for many compartments. And they’re easy for parents to pack. There’s no searching for plastic containers with lids that match. Leake says her husband takes one to work every day too, although “not the one with the butterfly embroidery, I should say. But he takes the bento box and puts it in the fridge at work.” Near the end of each school year, the former teachers usually bring a packed lunch for their kids’ teachers as a thank-you gift. One of the best advantages of My Square Meal, they say, is that it’s environmentally friendly. They don’t use any of those plastic baggies. If a student uses three of those a day, plus one plastic spoon, Leake and Quinn figure that to be about 720 pieces of trash. Their lunchboxes are recyclable, and the sporks that come with them are biodegradable.

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