A study was conducted to assess the practices of the respondents related to packing, storage and cleaning in context of children’s packed lunch boxes and to find out the correlation of these practices with the food borne disease incidence of children. Parents of 480 children (4-6 years) from Ludhiana and Patiala district of Punjab from both urban and rural areas were administered a questionnaire to elicit the information regarding choice of packaging material, choice of time to clean lunch boxes, usage of material and kind of lunch boxes, preferred medium for cleaning lunch boxes and attributes affecting purchase of lunch box. The respondents were asked to rate their practices in a rating scale of 5-1 and the results revealed that regarding the choice of packaging material it was seen that in both urban and rural respondents aluminium foil was the most preferred packaging material with the mean score of . This was followed by cloth napkin (mean score: ), paper napkin (mean score: ) and newspaper (mean score: ). Most of the respondents preferred evening time to clean lunch boxes with mean score of . Food grade plastic was the most preferred material with the mean score of preferably used by the urban respondents, followed by the stainless steel () and Low grade plastic (). | Protecting child health by preventing school packed lunch related food borne illnesses: A qualitative study of parents lunch box related practices
