Time For Lunch

posted by Geoff Andrews at Saturday, April 16, 2011

In a recent BBC Radio Scotland lunchtime interview, I was told by the interviewer - possibly in a hurry for his supermarket sandwich - that we don’t really have time for lunch anymore. Those that do (and I imagined him pointing the finger) are clearly a privileged minority, wandering around farmers’ markets at their leisure, while ordinary folk went about their business in harsh times with great velocity. In fact, ‘fast’, normally seen as the key to enlightenment and progress, was now seen as the austere and inevitable condition of modern life. Inescapable. Time for lunch? Must be joking.

However, those that see the erosion of the lunch hour as a necessary consequence of the recession underestimate its wider social value. The situation in schools is one example and has produced big debates on both sides of the Atlantic. Slow Food USA’s ‘Time For Lunch’ campaign was an ambitious project aimed at influencing the Child Nutrition Bill, and in particular raising the meagre $1 dollar a day school lunches. It was launched in 2010 with 300 eat-ins and 20,000 people involved in a nation-wide network. The overall goal is to take lunch seriously and to provide all kids with healthy sustainable food that tastes good. Such a campaign gets to the core of the ‘cheap food economy’, making the link between health care, diet, the production of food and the environment. The campaign provides another clear illustration of how the way we eat defines how we live.

In Britain, our own school meal campaigns, led by Jamie Oliver and others, have had their own impact, though the new coalition government has threatened recent progress by involving McDonald’s and other fast food monopolies in health policy. But the problem is more severe than that and goes beyond school meals. We are in danger of forgetting about lunch entirely. The British ‘lunch hour’, the product of a wider historic struggle for working conditions down the years, is now in jeopardy. In fact, according to the campaign group ‘Bring Back Britain’s Lunch Hour’, launched by the online recruitment firm Monster, 19% of British people take 15 minutes or less for lunch, while 10% never take a break. They found that one of the most favoured lunchtime activities was the ‘power nap’.

In 2010, apparently thinking along similar lines, Unison, Britain’s largest trade union, launched a ‘Reclaim your lunch hour’ campaign to combat workplace stress with a free picnic for members. Yet, the current recession and widespread financial insecurity is likely to curtail Britain’s lunch hour further as employees seek to economise as much as possible. The sandwich next to the computer, or employees remaining ‘chained to the desk’ as Monster refers to it, is already a familiar sight in offices across the country.

Long lunches have unfortunate connections with the ‘business lunch’ culture of the 1980s. These ‘yuppie’ years, associated with arrogance, excess and drunkenness, have given lunch a bad name. Even in food conscious Italy, the ‘Milano da bere’ (the ‘Milan you can drink’), in which Silvio Berlusconi first made a public impact with his TV networks, the Italian corporate world embraced such gastronomic horrors as Pasta con salmone affumicato. In Britain long lunches are inevitably equated with big drinking.

We have no need to return to those years. Yet, ironically, the current alcohol-free fast and work-dominated lunches have brought different problems. On the one hand this reflects a prissy managerialism which has replaced convivial eating with a rigid live-to-work culture. If lunches take place at all, these are dull business affairs with specified outcomes to be achieved by the time the bill arrives. Ordering wine in such company is like swearing in public; dessert, clearly frivolous and off-message. For the majority, lunchtimes have become individualised and anonymous, with employees furtively returning to consume their sandwiches in front of the computer. For all its acclaimed sophistication, global-speak and service ethic, corporate culture has more than done its bit to erode the simple pleasures of life. There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but soon there may be no lunch at all.

Let us propose the ‘Slow Lunch’. The best lunches I enjoyed recently have been in Badellino’s restaurant in Bra, Piemonte, Italy, while researching my Slow Food book. They were long and delicious, with seasonal local produce always on the menu. But they were also convivial. My companions were a rich mix of Slow Food afficionados and locals, with our hosts Giacomo and Marilena cheerfully putting up with the eclectic diet of football, food and politics. Slow Lunches needn’t be solely an Italian phenomenon. In Balthazar, the bustling Manhatton bistro, waiters are admired for their ‘civil inattention’ to the diners, rather than grabbing your plate as soon as the fork hits the table or bringing the check before you have asked for it.

Therefore, we shouldn’t think of Slow Lunches as the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure or only possible in Italy. They are good for work too. Not for the ‘points mean prizes’, how- to-motivate- your- workforce-for-better-performance kind of way. Rather, for generating ideas and exchanges, intellectual promiscuity and above all for reviving one of the simple pleasures of life.