The lunchbox request that arrives at 7:40 a.m. is rarely a ham sandwich. In a survey of 2,000 American parents, the asks included spaghetti tacos and crab legs, and the unusual list got longer from there.
Talker Research ran the survey for Chobani among parents of school-aged children, and it put spaghetti tacos and crab legs on a list of unusual lunch requests that also named a cold baked potato, raw beets, Salisbury steak, ketchup and cucumbers, and peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. The poll was fielded May 8-15, 2025, and published July 17, 2025, so these are 2025 numbers, not a new count.
The Request List, From Crab Legs to Cucumbers With Ketchup
The full list of unusual lunchbox asks, as Talker Research published it, reads like a dare to the person holding the lunch bag. Spaghetti tacos sit beside a cold baked potato, raw beets and crab legs. Salisbury steak, ketchup and cucumbers, and peanut butter and pickle sandwiches round it out.
Some of the picks have a long track record. Salisbury steak has carried that name in the United States since 1897, according to Wikipedia’s entry on the dish, and it still turns up in the supermarket freezer aisle as a TV dinner. A baked potato has been a dining-car classic since 1909, when the Northern Pacific Railway began serving them, Wikipedia notes. Neither dish was invented for a lunchbox, which is part of the fun.
Crab legs are the outlier. They are a restaurant splurge and a seafood-boil centerpiece, yet some child apparently wants them between a banana and a juice box.
Anyone who grew up in a big family household knows the drill: somebody always wants something different, and the person packing the bags has to decide where to draw the line.
What Parents Said No To
The survey also asked about requests that parents turned down. Candy, ice cream, wings, sushi, steak, soda and seafood boils made that list. A lunchbox can hold a lot, but a seafood boil is a stretch for any container with a zipper.
The two lists overlap in an interesting way. Crab legs came up as an unusual request, and seafood boils came up as a refusal. Salisbury steak and plain steak show a similar split. Kids appear to ask for the grown-up version of dinner, and parents tend to steer them toward something that survives a bus ride.
For families trying to widen the rotation, a few kindergarten lunch ideas on Frenz Hub show how far a packed lunch can stretch before it reaches taco-spaghetti territory.
Packing smarter helps too, and a roundup of clever kitchen tricks for home cooks offers a few ways to make a lunchbox job quicker.
What Comes Home Uneaten
The same poll found that 78% of parents send their kids to school with a packed lunch, and that nine in 10 of those kids come home with leftovers. About 76% of parents said they have talked with their kids about untouched food.
Parents gave three main reasons for the full lunchbox that comes home. Picky eating led at 39%. Another 25% said kids wanted more snacks and fewer mains, and 19% said kids preferred the food served at school.
Kids and parents also describe a good lunch differently. Among kids, a main and a snack topped the list at 50%, followed by something sweet at 44%, juice at 40% and water at 33%. Parents also put a main and a snack first, at 53%, but water came next at 51%, then juice at 42%.
Pickiness at 39% is the kind of problem a gentle approach to parenting tries to solve at the table, not just in the lunchbox.
The routine is familiar to anyone raised on the everyday habits kids of the 1980s and 1990s grew up with, when the lunch negotiation happened at the kitchen counter long before any survey counted it.
Why Approval Beats Surprise
What gets kids to finish lunch, according to the survey, is simple. Packing foods kids like was the top answer at 51%. Friends eating the same thing came in at 29%, and rewards for finishing at 19%.
That fits how parents described planning. About 74% said they frequently ask a child for approval on what goes in the box, and 85% said they would plan lunches together if the kids promised to eat what was planned. Among parents’ own packing priorities, child-approved foods led at 41%, and speed and convenience followed at 19%.
Kids have used the lunchbox to make a statement for generations. Wikipedia’s history of the lunchbox notes that a lithographed tin with Mickey Mouse became the first lunchbox decorated with a famous licensed character in 1935, and that the Hopalong Cassidy lunch kit sold 600,000 units in its first year, 1950. The box changed over the decades. The demands stayed.
Cold Foods Need to Stay Cold
An unusual lunch is still a lunch that has to survive until noon. The USDA’s Aug. 5, 2025, release on packing school lunches says perishables such as meat, poultry and eggs should stay below 40 degrees F and recommends at least two cold sources, such as gel packs, frozen water bottles or frozen juice boxes, placed above and below the food.
The agency’s advice on insulated lunch bags adds that perishables should not sit at room temperature for more than 2 hours, and that food kept in a brown paper bag for longer than that is unsafe to eat. That applies to a crab-leg lunch and a cold-cut sandwich alike.
One caution applies to the numbers. Chobani commissioned the poll, Talker Research ran it, and the answers are self-reported by parents. The figures date from spring 2025.
The lunch-hour lesson is still simple. Nine in 10 lunchboxes come home with something left in them, so parents may get further by asking the kid, packing what will actually get eaten, and keeping the cold things cold. Spaghetti tacos are optional.
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: Popo le Chien – CC BY-SA 3.0/Wikimedia Commons
