When my kids got old enough to start getting their own food, I stopped making lunch. I just encouraged them to get some leftovers (packaged, usually, in individual portion sizes, for their convenience and mine) out of the fridge and reheat them. This was … fine. It was teaching them independence, how to recognize and appropriately respond to their own body’s cues such as when they are hungry, and hopefully, with some education, how to figure out which leftovers to prioritize. It also gave me a bit of a break from the kitchen — a “break” in which to work at my paying job, but still.
When Chris started his new job a few months ago, his first week was hectic with training webinars and onboarding and all that, so I started taking his morning coffee and lunches out to him in the office.1 I was trying to help him get through that stressful first week, and it did help him, and he was very appreciative.
I only meant to do it for the first week or two. I figured once he settled into the routine, I would stop, and he would come in and microwave his own leftovers for lunch or something, as he used to. But I haven’t stopped.
Well, I have stopped taking him his coffee. When I was sick, I was often laying in bed past time when he had to be at work, so he started taking care of his own coffee, and now he usually just waits until the coffee is made and he takes it with him when he goes out there.
Lunch, though, continues. A new/old habit: I make lunch every day. He usually eats it at his desk, and the kids and I usually eat it together at the dining room table. And, let me tell you, it’s pretty great.
For one thing, now I eat lunch. In the beforetimes, I often ate nothing between my morning coffee (which admittedly has both gelatin and heavy cream in it) and getting super hangry2 at about 5:00 p.m. and feeling very stressed and anxious and irritated and snacking on bad things, before eating a huge dinner. It was not great for me. Now I think about lunch, and I eat lunch, and I am not hangry anymore and I sleep better on a more reasonable dinner portion.
Furthermore, one reason I started doing it is that I know Chris often gets to working on the computers and forgets to eat, too. And I figured it would make his day better, less stressed, and more productive if he didn’t forget to eat. Chris reports that this has gone as I foresaw: his days are better when he doesn’t have to worry about lunch or forget to eat.
It’s also of course very nice to have more time when the kids and I gather around the dining room table and chat about how their math is going or whether their Rachmaninoff piece is ready for Friday. At dinner, we are also usually gathered around the table, but this just gives us more planned but unhurried time together. And then sometimes at dinner, we are free to watch a movie or listen to an audiobook instead of talking about math homework.3
Another benefit is that, since I am the household food manager, it gives me some control — without having to harangue anyone about taking yesterday’s meatballs for lunch when last week’s fish and root casserole that was sadly partially burnt still needs to be eaten.4 It is another time of the day when I can notice what most needs to be used up and use it. Today I wanted to finish off a package of tortillas and a half-head of red cabbage, so we had quesadillas with a red cabbage slaw on the side. Yesterday we had leftover Thanks-mas turkey confit on top of leftover rice with various pickles whose jars I wanted to finish up so they could get out of the refrigerator. Most days our lunches are like this: not entirely freshly made or made from scratch (purchased bread or purchased tortillas, combined with leftovers, for example) but using up things that might otherwise go to waste. Being very careful about food waste is a necessary part of the way we have chosen to live; you can’t waste much if you have decided to stick with a rule that you can’t simply go buy more. Sometimes making lunch provides me an opportunity to make use of a leftover that would have been too small or incomplete to constitute someone’s lunch: a portion of leftover chicken that is small but can be cut up and repurposed into a naan-pizza5 topping with a small bit of leftover diced onion, that half-cup of leftover spaghetti sauce or BBQ sauce, etc.
I guess it’s also worth mentioning that making lunch is helpful because the two teenage boys eat more now than they used to, and we often have fewer leftovers after dinner to begin with. Teenage boys are an overwhelming metabolic force.
I didn’t used to worry too much about whether their lunches were balanced in terms of nutritional quality. They were still eating mostly homemade food (leftovers) after all, and, again following MFK Fisher, I think it’s fine to balance nutrition over a day rather than over each and every meal, but here again, making lunch provides me with some opportunity to ensure we are balancing over a day: if I know we’re going out to dinner at night and likely to eat just burgers and fries for that meal, I can make certain we get some things in our lunch to balance that out.
I hadn’t realized how much better our lives would be if I started making lunch again. I knew Chris’s workday would be easier, which is good in itself, but I didn’t realize how much better it would make the whole day for all of us. It’s made my life much better, because I don’t get hangry now, and now my kids spend an extra bit of time just sitting with me and chatting, and also because I get the extra little bit of satisfaction from taking care of all of them.
Furthermore, though, I am a person who needs chunks of time in which I can be alone and think — the kind of abstract thinking that makes being interrupted very hard. I don’t need a lot of this kind of time, and I don’t need it every day, but I do need it, and I need to be able to do it without feeling that I’m neglecting my kids and husband or that I will be interrupted constantly by them. I thought that adding another meal to my roster of responsibilities each day would make it harder to get that time, but it’s actually made it easier. It has provided that little bit of extra structure to all our days, a way to divide my day up between “can’t have space-out time” and “you are now free to have space-out time.”
Alton Brown always says that organization will set you free, and I think about that a lot. I think making lunch each day has been the right amount of organization for me, providing more benefits than I would have ever guessed.
We have an outbuilding in our backyard that we converted into a half-office, half-barn. The north side is office, and the south side is the rabbit barn. Chris’s commute is about 20 yards/meters. We have worked from home for the past six years (including time before we lived in this house) or so and having a separate office space has been really helpful.
This delightful word is a portmanteau of “hungry” and “angry” and so perfectly describes this feeling, I don’t know why we didn’t have this word for so long.
Also free to give them one of my “ted talks” as we jokingly call them. Someone asks a question and suddenly I’m going, “Well it all goes back to World War II,” and I give them a little lecture about the Marshall Plan or something. I do this kind of thing often enough that it’s just a running joke here. I think they enjoy it, but sometimes worry they are just humoring me. I do have enough self-awareness to stop if people really aren’t interested.
I’m sorry, this is a reference to my favorite novel, Fisher’s Hornpipe by Todd McEwen. When Chris read it and liked the ending, I think that’s the moment I knew we were meant to be together.
Breads of various kinds are one of my most commonly purchased premade food items. I keep premade naan in the freezer and we usually end up using it for quick pizza instead of eating it with curry, go figure. Very convenient.
really enjoyed these past two posts.
I'm a big fan of the WFH lunch and guard that time on my calendar as jealously as I'm able. it's usually something quick but made from scratch (an omelet, a sandwich, okonmiyaki, pasta) -- I tend to save leftovers for dinner when that's what's on my plan for the day. stepping away from the work desk, walking ten feet into the kitchen, and making something for myself just feels damn good