The Importance of Lunch : And Other Real-Life Adventures in Good Eating

The Importance of Lunch

You think you know someone well, and then a chance remark exposes an unbridgeable gulf. I was talking to a friend, someone I met in university over twenty years ago, and mentioned a new restaurant that had opened up near his office. The room was bright and airy, I told him, with high ceilings and Gothic windows that seemed to lift the spirits on a cold December day. The cooking was modern but sensible, or did I mean sensible but modern: barley soup accompanied by crusty focaccia that you could dip in garlic-scented olive oil, sandwiches layered with smoky portobello mushrooms or meaty swordfish, warm cornmeal pound cake in a sugary espresso sauce to prolong the meal well into the afternoon. Just reciting the menu was enough to make me check the calendar and decide how soon I could afford to book a table again.

Then came those fateful words.

"I don't eat lunch," he said.

        Now perhaps I'm easily shocked - I couldn't bring myself to read, let alone steal, techniques from that Cosmo article on "The Ten Things He Can Do to Drive You Wild." But when someone I considered a friend of long standing, someone whose champagne I've guzzled and whose neighbours I've insulted, says he doesn't make time for the midday meal, I'm stopped short.

What to say? Maybe his cholesterol's up and his doctor told him to cut back? Maybe he's on a year-long lunchtime fast with the proceeds going to the eradication of world hunger? Maybe he's just one of those superior beings who doesn't get hungry between breakfast and dinner, who puts in value-added time at the desk or on the StairMaster while you spend an hour or two marvelling at the way the sun streams through the Gothic windows and lights up the focaccia, to say nothing of your waistline.

Being a firm believer in the institution of lunch, and in anything else that makes eating a pleasure worth prolonging, I like to think his non-observance will catch up with him. He'll begin grabbing a chocolate-chip muffin at eleven a.m. just to tide himself over, or nibble on a Mars bar around three p.m. for a quick energy fix. Maybe he'll take up smoking to suppress the pangs of hunger or start moaning to his colleagues about the drawbacks in the company dental plan just to get away from his work. His eyes will suffer from staring at the computer terminal. His shoulders will seize up from repetitive strain. Don't eat lunch? No, and you've stopped living too.

Humans were not meant to go from morning to night without food. No matter how sedentary we've become, we still need to eat. And because we've become so deskbound, we need the distraction - no, the exercise - of a lunch break.

Easier said than done, of course. While I'm trying to preach the virtue of midday gluttony, the medical profession - a group collectively responsible for much of the anxiety we now feel about putting food in our mouths - has discovered that rats live longer on low-calorie diets. This is very disturbing news.

It's disturbing not just because a few more rodents were used up in the name of scientific progress. No, what really weighs heavily on the embattled psyche is the message this breakthrough proclaims: Less is more in the world of food. Long life at any price is the goal of the human race. That's how those who ignore the supreme importance of lunch will judge the news passed on by the rats that lived, and died, at the subsistence level. Their interpretation is completely wrong.

Food has been taken over by the paramedics and the valetudinarians, those anxious, unhappy people who think we eat in order to survive. They tell us to swear off animal fat, renounce red meat, switch our allegiance to the bran of the week and turn our feasts into a self-congratulatory penance. The pang of guilt we feel when we reach for the butter is their doing. The health warnings that have found their way onto bottles of wine give them smug satisfaction. The idea that lunch could be the road to ruin has its scientific backup in their pronouncements. When we look upon a carrot and think beta carotene or milk and think calcium or full-fat cheese and think yecccchh, we have become slaves to their mind control.

Food is a pleasure. That needs to be said again and again in these mean, self-lacerating times.
From the Trade Paperback edition.