Seems M&S don’t know what lunch is

Charlie and I have always loved to eat out. When we lived in Toronto all those years ago, I’d say that rarely a day passed when we didn’t eat out for at least one meal. And even once we moved home to Ireland after our year away, we continued to eat out several times a week. No longer having the freedom to do that came as quite a shock to us when Little Man arrived on the scene.

But as he’s been getting older, we’ve been finding it much easier to eat out. These days the three of us manage to eat out for dinner about once a fortnight, and every weekend we usually eat out for either breakfast or lunch.

On Saturday last we were in Dublin for the day, so we decided to have lunch in the Marks and Spencer’s cafe on Henry Street. Now if you’ve ever seen an M&S food ad, you’ll be able to imagine what I had in mind. “This is not just lunch, it’s M&S lunch” is what I was thinking.

And to be fair, Charlie and I did have a lovely lunch. Unfortunately for Little Man, I spotted a Kid’s Lunch Bag while buying the food, and obviously brainwashed by a few too many M&S food ads over the years, I trusted the brand and just bought it, with little more than a glance at the packaging where the words “organic”, “apple juice”, “raisins” and “cheese” popped out at me. To be honest, I was expecting contents similar to those great IKEA snack boxes to be given the “M&S food treatment” in that little bag.

Not even close. What was in that bag was not just lunch, in fact it wasn’t lunch at all.

Is this really a lunch?

So let’s see. What did it contain?

• Organic Apple Juice – not so bad.
• Raisins – a nice little snack.
• Cheese triangle snacks – I doubt these things ever saw a piece of cheddar in their lives. What these were was a packet of high salt, low nutrition, cheese crackers. There wasn’t even a slice of cheese to put on them!
• A chocolate lollipop – Dessert I guess. Which might be okay if there was a main course.

The really irritating thing about this is that the bag wasn’t even labelled “snack bag”. If it was, that might go some way towards explaining the contents. No, it was labelled lunch! I don’t know about you but I’d expect a bit more than a few salty crackers and raisins for lunch. And a growing child does too.

Whoever designs the children’s food options in the M&S cafe could do with paying a visit to IKEA to learn how these things are supposed to be done. We certainly won’t be planning any more family lunches in M&S, that’s for sure.