Family Feeding Frenzy

When airlines quit serving meals, many travelers felt annoyed and inconvenienced. As a mother of two rapidly growing children, I was truly alarmed. How in the world was I going to keep my kids fed on long flights? Because as every parent knows, a hungry child is a an extremely grumpy child!

On vacation last summer, we faced one of the longest flights we have ever been on as a family: 7 hours nonstop from Puerto Rico to California. And my son, almost 13 yrs old, was an eating machine.



As my husband and I were packing up the night before our flight home, we surveyed the kitchen of our villa, wondering what to do with the sandwich supplies we had purchased with good intentions, but never got around to eating. We could certainly make sandwiches to take on the plane, but how were we going to carry them?

Then my husband had a brilliant idea. With the help of our son, he emptied the entire loaf of bread onto the counter and set up a sandwich-making assembly line. In no time they had a dozen ham, turkey, and cheese sandwiches made, which he then restacked and inserted back into the bread bag. We tied it up, stuck it in the refrigerator, and it was ready to go the next morning.


As we walked through the airport with our “loaf” I am sure we got a few stares. (And we did receive a bit of extra attention from a sniffer dog at San Juan International Airport. The DEA agent actually had to encourage him to move away from us.) But I bet some of those looks turned to envy as we pulled what seemed to be an endless supply of sandwiches out of that bag throughout the flight.

We have a trip to France coming up in April, our first flight will be 10 hours long. So we are already talking about using this same strategy for keeping our kids full during the trip.

Do you have any tips for feeding your kids on long plane rides? What foods have you found pack well and keep kids full? Please post your comments here!