Why I'll Keep Giving My Daughter "Poopie" For Lunch

By Raakhee Mirchandani for Elle Magazine

Another school lunch to pack, another day I fill my daughter's tiffin with poopie.

I don't set out to send her to school with a sack full of shit—I spend time making the daal, chopping the veggies and simmering and sautéing everything in just the right amount of herbs and spices. But any way I slice it, my daughter's friends think her lunch looks like crap.

Most days when Satya, my precocious preschooler, comes home from daycare, she's brimming with excitement to tell us about the insanity of the day. Three-year-olds are weirdos and often the stuff they want to share is either supremely mundane, just literally narrating what's happening in front of them, or borderline insane, say, questioning whether they should file a police report to alert the cops that the Big Bad Wolf was on the loose, had terrorized some pigs, and could easily come for the rest of us. (True story, by the way. We've spent countless hours explaining the many wonders of concrete apartment buildings, primarily as a safeguard against wild wolf attacks.)

So when my child came home incensed last week, I took notice."Mike called my purple aloo poopie," she said over dinner. (Aloo is the Hindi word for potato.)