Views: 44 Author: TH-CS2 Publish Time: 2019-01-25 Origin: Site
Packed lunches are suddenly chic. I first realized this a couple of years ago in the cafeteria of the library where I do much of my research. I had brought in a bento box of food from home, and two women, both strangers, rushed up to compliment me on my lunch. I wasn’t eating anything so remarkable: just some leftover pasta jazzed up with herbs, a few slices of mozzarella with olives and a portion of cold roasted carrots sprinkled with pumpkin seeds and chili flakes. But it seems that the brown bag lunch has become an object of desire.
It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when bringing your own lunch to work felt like drawing the short straw. It was no fun to be the person holding a drooping bologna sandwich while your workmates waltzed into the office with something like fresh focaccia stuffed with goat cheese and basil from the bakery or a fragrant box of Asian peanut noodle salad. Eating from a sweating tupperware container at your desk felt like being the kid at school who sat alone in the cafeteria.
Now lunch envy has gone the other way: Being the person who has prepped your own lunch inspires not pity but admiration. I recently spent three days doing some work out of a recording studio in northwest London. On the lunch breaks, I was struck by how many of the young people working there had brought their own home-cooked food to eat. As they nibbled cold Spanish omelet or mixed meze and flatbreads, these 20-somethings compared notes on their favorite knives and new ingredients. Such a scene would have once been unimaginable.
There are many reasons, I suspect, for this lunchbox renaissance. Some of it is driven by economic necessity. Given the crazy price of rents in the big cities of the world, it makes more sense to lunch on leftovers than to squander $10 a day on a mediocre sandwich. I met a man in his 20s who told me he had eaten beetroot risotto three days in a row for lunch and dinner. “Is it because you really love beetroot?” I asked him. “No, it’s cheap,” was his reply.
Another reason that we have started loving packed lunches so much is because the gear has become so cool. Lunch from home takes on an element of Japanese elegance when it is housed in one of those new bento boxes with multiple compartments. The day those two women complimented me on my lunch, I had packed it in a three-compartment square box that somehow makes everything look appetizing. Thus arranged, even yesterday’s canned tuna resembles a treat from Dean & DeLuca. Those women were really admiring the box more than its contents.
There is also the fact that much of modern cooking, with its robust spicing and varied textures, lends itself so well to being eaten cold (or in a thermos) the next day. The whole proposition of a packed lunch is much easier if you don’t have to make a sandwich from scratch at breakfast time. In the days when home cooking tended to mean a hunk of protein with a separate starch and some vegetables, it wasn’t obvious how to conjure tomorrow’s lunch from today’s dinner. But when you are cooking a spread of Middle Eastern or Asian dishes, it’s easy to put some aside to be eaten the next day with a wedge of lemon and a few herbs.
There is still a snag. In order to be in possession of these lovely leftovers, you need to find the time for cooking the night before. I can’t pretend I always manage it myself. There are plenty of days when I still rush out of the house, bento-less, and end up spending slightly too much money on a tub of takeaway soup. My hunch is that this is the real source of our packed-lunch envy. It isn’t the food itself that we covet so much as the leisure time it represents.
