The Lunch Hour
A guide to the most important meal of the day.
This is not about lunch break productivity.
Anyone who thinks I’m gonna take thirty midday minutes to do Kegels while balancing my “virtual checkbook” can go fuck themselves. Nay, this is a guide to bringing a lunch to work. Specifically: how to make bringing your lunch to work less depressing.
Step one: The Trappings.
This is all the stuff we can buy to make ourselves feel less peasant-y. Stuff like the food container, the lunch bag, and the brightly colored nonessentials.
As far as food containers go, aim high. No matter how much you scrub a piece of plastic Tupperware, it will grow a layer of gutter slime so tenacious that the essence of chili will be injected into any other food that stained plastic basin ever contains. Get glass Tupperware. It’s expensive, but bringing your lunch to work will save you piles upon piles of money. Recently fallen, freshly raked piles of money. You will be able to invest in some aspirational ‘ware.
After getting a glass container, you need to get something in which to carry it. Leaky chicken tikka masala makes a purse stink like tiny ketchup hands. Get a lunch bag.
If you go the brown paper bag route, I want to empower you with a world of options. Sure, there’s the classic brown paper bag, associated equal parts with school field trips and public intoxication. But trust. There are other variations too. Variations that will blow your mind.
There are — I’d never lie to you — brown paper bags that can actually keep a square shape.
HUMAN INGENUITY!
These bags also have handles.
“ITALIAN” FINGER CLUSTER LEAPING FROM A KISSY MOUTH!
If you want one of these brown paper marvels, buy something at a store operated by middle-aged women. Stationery stores, gift shops, tchotchke boutiques — they all put purchases in “rustic” brown bags. Granted, those stores have been known to prompt potpourri-induced asthma attacks, so you can also just buy your bags near the wrapping paper in any unscented shopping venue.
For people living a brown paper free lifestyle, there are plastic bags and retail bags. The thing about plastic bags though is that it mostly just feels like you’re carrying around dog shit.
Retail bags are king. They pack a one-two punch. Not only is your glass Tupperware resting in what is basically a lunch briefcase — but you are also communicating that you shop with some amount of regularity. You are on top of things. Your underwear isn’t seven years old, and you support stores with consciences. Feels good. Whatever you do, just don’t bring your food in a designer retail bag. No one wants to lunch with an entry-level asshole.
Once you have even just barely begun to establish a BYOL routine, then, and only then, should you spring for reusable silverware. Maybe you get the bamboo set, with chopsticks. Maybe you choose the Swiss Army-esque KnifeForkSpoon thing, or even the polycarbonate spork. Whatever your new flatware, it will suddenly make your lunch bag look disposable in a shameful way. This means you have now jumped levels to the The Lunch Box. It is at this moment that I start to walk away slowly, stepping backwards into the mist, leaving you at the trailhead of the path through The Etsy Forest, on which you must discover your true Lunch Box, guided only by your inner voice, reading directly from the screen, “if you liked that thing…you might…perhaps…you might like this thing.”
Step two: The Food.
Our nourishment. Our reason for being. Our only motivation for going to work in the first place.
There is just one rule for what food to pack. It is this. BRING THE LUNCH YOU’LL ACTUALLY EAT.
Don’t bring kale if the mere thought of kale makes you want to dive down an elevator shaft. Don’t bring cottage cheese if one look at those curds makes your bowels clench with fear and your mind blink with boredom. Completely healthy lunches are impossible to choke down five days a week, so you MUST bring the food or processed edibles that you actually like. Go ahead, throw yourself a bone in your chicken. It’ll be much tastier and can withstand getting nuked better than its skinless boneless cousin.
The last minor note about food is that you should steal from casual dining establishments around your workplace. Part of why bringing your lunch to work can be so fucking boring is that it robs you a reason to leave the office. If you intentionally don’t bring something, you’ve given yourself a reason to get outside and get looting. And lunch stops have all kinds of free stuff for their paying customers. Plastic silverware, lemons, sugar, salt and pepper, napkins, mustard, mayonnaise, light mayonnaise, soy sauce, hot sauce, mild sauce, water, even ice. As a bring-your-own-luncher, living on the fringes of society, you’re allowed to take certain liberties with these amenities.
Step three: The Process.
The shittiest thing that can happen when you start bringing your lunch to work is forgetting to bring it. When you are halfway to the office and realize your favorite food inside your glass Tupperware in your fancy-ass bag is still sitting on your eh-it’ll-do-for-now kitchen counter, then it seems like there’s no point in ever trying this shit again and that packed lunch can just stay there and rot as an example to all other foods to never, ever dare play the packed lunch game again.
This will happen at least once.
But repress that blinding rage. There are ways to remember your lunch. You can set a reminder on your phone. You can also blanket the backside of your front door in sticky notes from past you harassing present you to not forget it. Finally, you can hide your keys inside the lunch bag so that you physically cannot lock a door or start a car without your food.
This may delay your departure, but it’s worth it. If your supervisor looks pissed off when you show up late, just reach in that lunch sack and toss something tasty his/her way. Food heals all wounds.
So that’s it. That’s all it takes. Bon Appétit. I love you.
