Man is born to lunch, and everywhere he is eating al desko. According to research by Ocado, the online supermarket, the number of office workers making packed lunch is surging. Polling suggests that 46 per cent of professionals have started bringing their food from home more regularly over the last year. The reason why is obvious: cozzy livs. Around three quarters of those surveyed believe that buying lunch around their office has become too costly and that bringing their lunch from home helps them to keep a handle on their finances. It’s bye-bye to the Pret a Manger salad and toodle-oo to the Greggs sausage roll; bring out the Tupperware.
Life’s too short for too much meal prepping and health-maxxing
Official figures show the cost of a café lunch spiking by a third since 2021, driven by post-Covid inflation and Labour’s hikes to national insurance, business rates and the minimum wage. My own Pret order of choice, from the fine establishment around the corner to Old Queen Street – a Classic Super Club, tomato soup, packet of crisps and Coke Zero, with a cookie if I’m feeling zesty – comes in at almost £15. We’re not on footballers’ wages here at the Speccie; wrapping up a ham sandwich in tin foil or bringing in the remnants of last night’s cottage pie to be warmed through makes far more financial sense than eating out. But it’s so boring.
There is no more depressing way to lunch than unfurling your flattened sarnie from within its metallic cocoon, dodging your colleagues’ disapproving looks as you try in vain not to spill sauce and crumbs over your desk and trousers, tacitly ostracised for a lack of adventurousness. There’s no break; the same web page blinks away in front of you that you were scrolling until you decided to surrender to the hunger at 11:45 a.m. You sit there, unsatisfied, thinking wistfully of the delights you could acquire from Leon or Itsu if you weren’t another unhappy victim of Rachel Reeves. Even for us feckless hacks, it’s the closest we come once a day to feeling like just another wagecuck. This isn’t a life for a man of letters, but for people with proper jobs and actual responsibilities.
Which is why, I confess, I have been known to sneak off. Sod the finances; damn the tinfoil. When the Nicholson’s pub around the corner does such a reasonable lunchtime deal – £16.00 for a steak sandwich, chips and a pint, hardly to be sniffed at – it can all seem too tempting. There’s also the traditional allure of the expenses account. In my long-distant ConservativeHome days, I became a budding expert on the restaurants and hostelries of Westminster. Why bother with the Tupperware, when a couple of think-tankers are keen to talk in the Cinnamon Club? Alas, in these more straitened times, the freedom to eat al expenso is reduced. Try as I might, I can’t escape the constraints imposed by central London prices and a budding hack’s salary.
But perhaps the real constraint is my own imagination. Ocado’s research suggests that my ideas of the packed lunch are stuck in the past, a timid hangover from long ago primary school lunchtimes of Scooby-Doo lunchboxes, Ice Gems and Sun-Maid raisins. Sales of microwavable rice are up 24 per cent, while searches for ‘lunch bowls’ – the technical term for those rabbit food pots of salad, vegetables, pasta and healthy bits – are up 79 per cent year on year. Saving money isn’t the only reason behind the rise of packed lunches; health consciousness is also a driving factor. If my fellow Gen Zs and millennials can’t find the money for a Pret sarnie, they certainly aren’t shelling out for Mounjaro. Bringing your own lunch facilitates calorie counting and nutrient control.
On Instagram and TikTok, influencers abound informing their hundreds of thousands of followers about how to pack their lunchboxes with as much protein and greenery as they can manage. Looking around the office, it’s a trend that has caught on at the Spectator; all manner of colourful rices, beans and salad are taking up the space in the office fridge where the Pol Roger should be. But while this is all very sensible and worthy, it’s a trend that I could never get on board with. Life’s too short for too much meal prepping and health-maxxing, especially when the pub is just around the corner. Sod the Bento boxes. Take out your card, dump your Tupperware in the bin, and lunch like a man. After the first two pints, you forget the cost.
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