Older folks can take advantage of the back-to-school sales by reliving not their youth, which is too far back in the murky past to be relevant in today’s world, but the youth of our children. Thus I found the temptation of on-sale Lunchables at Prairie Market too tempting to resist.

As I recall, Lunchables came out when my kids were in grade school and were composed in those days of meat, crackers and a Capri Sun drink of whatever flavor wasn’t selling well on its own. The kids loved Lunchables but they did not pass every parent’s basic math test in which daily costs are multiplied by 181, the number of mandatory school days in Washington. So figure three kids at $1.50 per Lunchable each, equals $4.50 per day, which equals a budget–busting $814.50 per year. Compared to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a few celery sticks and a cookie, this was eating high on the hog if it was a ham Lunchable, or high on the turkey if it was the other choice.

Parental multiplication doomed the kids to only a rare Lunchable, perhaps on a birthday or game day involving a long bus ride to Granite Falls from which there was always the chance they would starve before they got back.

At Prairie Market I chose a modern, low-fat Lunchable boasting “40 percent less fat than our regular Lunchable combinations,” without mentioning how much fat actually remains. Inside the cardboard box sealed in a plastic vacuum pack were seven round slices of turkey, seven round crackers, the inevitable fruit punch Capri Sun, and fat-free Jello-O chocolate pudding. The bill came to less than $2.50, which is cheaper than you can eat at McDonald’s for a similar assortment of food-like items.

The secret of Lunchable’s success through the years has probably been the round slices of meat which fit perfectly on the round crackers. Curiously, the cheese remains rectangular. Oscar Mayer, the parent company of Lunchables, apparently didn’t push for round cheese slices. Perhaps achieving round meat was so stressful that they just let the cheese people have their way.

Regardless, the cracker stacked with round turkey and rectangular cheese tasted just fine, even without the missing fat. The Capri Sun tasted like watered-down fruit punch, which was as expected. The Jello-O was a bit like glue, due no doubt to its essence having been drained of all fat, but even glue is tasty enough if it’s chocolate.

Sadly, I had to eat the Lunchable in the privacy of my office. There’s some unwritten code that Lunchables are for kids, not adults, and that any adult seen with a Lunchable must be up to no good.

To overcome this decades-long stigma, adults will simply have to eat more Lunchables so society gets accustomed to the sight of it. They’re cheap, fairly filling, and my lunch totaled only 340 calories.

Next time you go to lunch with friends or co-workers, pull out a Lunchable, or have an all-adult Lunchable party at work. The kids will be too busy with their iPods to notice we’ve stolen their favorite lunch.