Lunch, the most underrated meal

Lunch is the meal that happens to you rather than the meal you have. It is eaten at the desk, from a box, while reading something, and it is over before it is noticed. In many countries this would be regarded as a small tragedy. In ours it is regarded as efficient.

The case for a proper lunch is not nutritional. It is that the day has a middle, and the middle is where attention is restored or lost. Forty minutes away from the screen, with food that required a plate, returns a person to the afternoon who is measurably more useful than the one who ate at the keyboard.

Nobody will give you the forty minutes. You will have to take them, and the taking feels indulgent for about a week. Then it feels like lunch, which is what it was always supposed to be.