The Importance of Lunch
James was a breakfast guy. He always felt hungry in the morning because he tended not to eat much in the evening after a relatively early dinner. It may have had something to do with his mother drilling into him at an early age that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. No matter, he liked a generous breakfast usually with something savory and a little something sweet. In the western world that usually meant eggs and some sort of breakfast meat. His preferred menu was a cheddar cheese omelet with a side of either crisp bacon or sausage. White toast on the side was good with the ability to use butter and/or jam (not marmalade, please) to get that little taste of sweet in.
James was also an early riser who found his most productive part of the day to be the morning hours. It is simply true that people are either morning or evening people and James was the former. He would wear out by late afternoon and was never quite sure what was the cause and the effect of all of that, biorhythmically speaking. Did his early morning burst of energy deplete him by afternoon or would he be depleted anyway? His best indicator was when he was on vacation since he liked to be active in the morning and restful in the afternoon. It seems that’s just the way his body liked to operate.
By dinner time he was ready for a meal and a relaxing conversation, but dinner was not the family social scene some had grown up knowing. James didn’t have that sort of family dinner history. His family’s life did not centered on food or meals even though they shared plenty of them while he was growing up. His mother was a single working woman and more often than not, dinner was catch-as-catch-can, as his mother used to say. That is some version of throwing something together with what’s in the refrigerator and cupboards.
These days James had a more systematic approach available to him for evening meal planning and preparation. She was called Janice and she was James’ wife of the past dozen years. Janice didn’t eat much at dinner usually, but she always made James a nice dinner (80-90% of the days of the week). So James literally never worried about or thought about dinner. If Janice wasn’t home due to some function she needed to attend, he just ordered from Grubhub and was done with it. He really had little concern about food as strange as that seemed to most people. James was a rather large man so everyone assumed food was a priority, when in fact it was the opposite. His weight issues stemmed from his inability to give much respect to food or what he ate, not due to any sort of obsession with food.
Whenever James and Janice dined out with friends (a regular occurrence since they lived in Manhattan and city folk tend to do their entertaining around nice dinners at fine restaurants), James was the kind of guy who took one look at the menu, went down until he saw something he liked and then promptly closed the menu without even looking over all the selections. Whatever a Foodie was, James was the opposite. It used to drive Janice a little nuts since she liked to contemplate the menu carefully and was always asking waiters which was better, the Atlantic salmon or the sea bass. It all struck James as very funny because Janice would order salmon when they were out almost 95% of the time. It was clearly her go-to meal and if it were James, he would just not bother with the menu and ask for the salmon or the closest thing to it.
Whenever they ate at friends or family’s houses, James would just grit his teeth and hope that they hadn’t made something he detested. On the list of detestable foods were fish (unless it was fish & chips and lite white fish at that), fresh tomatoes, mushrooms, olives, lamb/mutton, whole bone-in chicken in any form and most vegetables. James had always thought of himself as easy to please, but he was coming to realize that when it came to food, he was increasingly picky by almost any standards. Nevertheless, he never fussed about it, though he did often eat sparingly when it was something he hadn’t specifically ordered.
And then there was lunch. When he was a kid, James loved lunch. Baloney sandwiches, Frito corn chips and any kind of cookie was mana from heaven to him. He always looked forward to lunch both as a break in a long day and as a pleasant repast. The simpler the better by his reckoning. It could be on a paper napkin to be eaten by hand and he was happy.
When James moved into the working world, lunch became an increasingly challenging meal for him. He liked it in his junior years when he just went to the cafeteria and got what he liked for a simple lunch. As he started to be required to wine and dine people he was back into the conundrum of ordering off the menu and finding things he didn’t hate.
There was a short period of time when James was working from home for about a year. Those days he would ask Janice what was for lunch. That was a stressful time for them. As they say, for better or worse, but not for lunch. It also didn’t suit James that well either. He didn’t mind getting what he got for dinner, but not getting what he wanted for lunch seemed wrong to him. He wanted what he wanted. Lunch was his personal pacifier for the day. It was his emotional eating moment, his comfort food time.
Now in the later years of his career he is back to having choices that he always likes. He has two restaurants that he likes nearby (nearby is a big part of the equation to James…no restaurant is worth going too far to get to) and he doesn’t need the menu since he knows what he likes and they always have it for him. If he is doing the deli program he goes with either a ham & cheese on white (the adult version of a baloney sandwich), chips and a Diet Coke. Occasionally he gets Lo Mein noodles and sesame chicken, but only if he is in the mood or someone is going to the hot table to get food for everyone. If he orders from Grubhub, he gets a simple half Italian sandwich and chips from Subway (it’s a rapid reorder on the Grubhub system). Keeping it simple and not bothering with too many choices makes lunch a continued pleasant experience.
James feels it makes the day go so much smoother if lunch is easy-going and not a hassle. The proof is in the pudding (something that can easily distract him if it is placed near the checkout counter). He believes he is the only man in the world that has to walk further each day (a half block) to go to the deli for lunch than he would have to if he were to go home for lunch (less than a half block). It is important to have a pleasant lunch.