What are you having for lunch? A store-bought sandwich that crumbles all over your keyboard as you digest the latest depressing world news? A $10 (Dh37) salad, eaten in front of your computer, as you toggle mindlessly between Facebook and your work?
If you’re like the majority of office workers worldwide, whatever you’re having for lunch, you’re probably dining al desko. Some 80 per cent of employees don’t take a regular lunch break. Rather, we cram in our calories solo, and swiftly: on average it takes just 15 minutes to eat lunch. And while it may seem sad that so many of us are masticating alone, with only the glow of our screens for company, a lot of people actually prefer it that way. In one study, a quarter of millennial employees agreed with the statement “I eat alone to multitask better”.
It’s tempting to paint the sad desk lunch as a modern phenomenon. A consequence of a constantly connected corporate culture that holds “busyness” as its highest value. But the truth is, we can’t blame our work-obsessed culture.
We haven’t always sandwiched a midday meal between breakfast and dinner. Lunch has evolved from a sometimes snatched snack to a more formal food occasion as the way we work has evolved. It’s both the fruit of labour and the fuel of labour — the most capitalist of meals.
Lunch, as it is known in Anglo-American society today, was cooked up during the industrial revolution. Longer hours at factories situated a long way from home meant the office lunch became ingrained in the routine of working life. A regular occasion rather than an occasional snack.
At the turn of the century, speed and efficiency shaped the lunch break. “Haste seems to be a controlling factor in the luncheon of the worker,” noted “Munsey’s Magazine” in 1901. The need for speed when it came to workday feeding launched new quick-serve food concepts such as cafeterias and automats. Workers might not have been eating at their desks, but they were still scarfing sustenance alone.
The fabled power lunch was another innovation designed to optimise food-fuelled productivity. The concept was invented by the Four Seasons New York in the late 1970s; they had the idea of designing a meal that would be conducive to doing business. The tables were set far apart to give businessmen (and they were mainly men) privacy. You could buy wine by the glass and get a good meal in under an hour.
As technology makes face-to-face meeting and eating increasingly redundant, the power lunch of yore has lost its appetite appeal. Indeed, Four Seasons restaurant shut its doors last month, marking the end of an eating-era.
In its stead come power bowls and other good-for-you fast food alternatives aimed at a generation of more health-conscious workers, people with standing desks and mindfulness apps.
The power lunch has also been replaced with a slew of new, powered-by-technology lunch startups, all promising to spice up your workday meal. UberEats offers fast delivery from local restaurants, meaning that your options to go broke buying lunch have significantly expanded. New York’s Maple delivers a rotating menu of celebrity-created lunch options for a flat $12 fee. Arcade lets you order meals by text. Bots have also emerged as a new way to more seamlessly order lunch from within productivity platforms. Taco Bell, for example , has integrated with workplace messaging company Slack to offer an AI-powered ordering service. Users talk with the bot, order food and pay through Slack.
Then there are new lunch services that help you get you out of the office, even if just to pick up your food. MealPass, started by a founder of ClassPass, is a subscription-style lunch model that offers a daily selection of weekday lunch options for $119 a month, which works out to around $6 a lunch. You log on to the service before 9.30am, pick one of the options available near your office, and pop out to collect it at a designated time. I tried it out for a couple days and it definitely injected variety into my usual lunch routine — which generally consists of going to the nearest purveyor of foodstuffs and buying the same sandwich every day.
Here’s the thing though. While it’s theoretically nice to have all this variety, I’m not sure people are all that desperate for it. I quite like a predictable lunch. But maybe that’s because my tastebuds are English — apparently 32 per cent of British office workers eat the same thing (usually a cheese sandwich) every day, with the average worker having done so for nearly four and a half years.
All of these lunch-based innovations lead me to the rather terrifying conclusion that we may now be living in the golden age of office lunches. In the 1980s, lunch, like sleep, was “for wimps”. However, as technology has changed the way we work and the sort of work we value, there has been a renewed focus on both sleep and proper nutrition as essential tools for productivity. Meanwhile, tech giants such as Google and Facebook have made a free lunch an expectation for many workers. Lunch is no longer for wimps — it’s good business and good for business.
This doesn’t mean we’re all going to start lingering over lunch, however. Far from it. Rather, I reckon we’re going to move towards a more data-heavy diet. The rise of the “quantified employee” means employers will soon be able to ensure we’re eating and sleeping in the most efficient manner. There has already been a 300 per cent increase in sales of Soylent, a meal-replacement drink beloved by Silicon Valley types obsessed with efficiency. Indeed Soylent has ambitions to take a large bite out of the lunch market. “If you take a historical view, you see that food is in a constant process of evolution. We’re just a part of that,” the CMO told Bloomberg. I’m afraid he is right.
So enjoy your limp sandwich while it lasts. The only thing more depressing than a sad desk lunch is a sad desk meal-replacement beverage lunch. Best consumed solo, of course, as you mutter, between sips: “I eat alone to multitask better.”
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
