The Future of Work Is... Lunch

Let's stop treating the midday meal as a productivity zapping distraction

- David Sax

Remember lunch?

It was the meal that wasn’t supposed to matter anymore. Long in decline as the plastic clamshell salad colonized spare desk real estate, the weekday lunch break was an immediate casualty of the shift to remote work at the start of the pandemic. Across office parks and downtowns the world over, the great feedlots of salaried workers sat empty: boozy clubhouses; takeout holes-in-the-wall specializing in pre-grilled panini; food trucks slinging cumin-scented chicken thighs drizzled with white sauce and atop a generous bed of rice.

During the past half-century, the workday lunch has been cast as a wasteful indulgence, the enemy of productivity, especially in America. It ate away at company time, interrupted the flow of work, taxed the wallets of employees and heaped on unnecessary calories, leading to weight gain and the dreaded “lunch coma” that further sapped afternoon output. Before the pandemic, more than 60% of US professionals ate lunch at their desks, more than half ate lunch alone, and over a third rarely, if ever, took a lunch break at all. Sure, some startups invested their VC funding in kale-heavy subsidized spreads, but for most, lunch was an outdated decadence … a meal for wimps, as Gordon Gekko put it icily in Wall Street.

You know what’s for wimps? Sitting at home in your sweatpants, laptop propped up on the kitchen counter, eating questionable hummus on crackers as a Zoom call drones on in the background, in the saddest Tupperware party life can serve up.