Let’s hear it for lunch
Lunch is having a moment.
The New Yorker recently ran a piece touting lunch as the best meal of the day, because, “unlike breakfast, lunch offers variety, but, in contrast to dinner, it tolerates repetition.” The New York Times recently chimed in with a piece on super-agers, and how they have been able to retain their cognitive abilities by, among other things, getting together for lunch.
Let me say here, then, I’ve known the benefits of lunch for a long time. I’m an early adopter. I’m a long-time believer in lunch and have devoted much of my retirement to it.
I eat lunch out with a different friend two or three times a week. I have a regular rotation, and regular locations. With Bob, it’s the Korean barbecue place. With Steve, it’s the café with scratch-made breakfasts served all day. With Jock, it’s the bagel place. With Michele it used to be the sort-of-Turkish place, but they changed the menu and now it’s the diner-like place down the street.
The barbecue and the bagels and the breakfasts made from scratch are, really, just an excuse. What we’re really doing is taking advantage of our open schedules, our flexibility, to catch up. Think of it: we can actually get together and just shmooze in the middle of the day! No deadlines to meet, no other appointments to scurry off to, no reports to file, no team meetings to attend. Just open-ended time to talk and talk and then talk some more.
It’s a time we can find out how the kids and grandkids are doing, what trips are being planned, how the last trip went, what books are being read and TV series being watched and what aches are being experienced. Want to see some pictures of the trip to the Grand Canyon or the vacation in Cassis? Yes, we can do that, we have time to do that.
Theoretically, we could do all this, of course, over the phone or via email or maybe even posting on Facebook or some other site. But that’s obviously not intimate nor casual enough. We could do dinners, obviously, but that would be more formal, might involve more people, be more compressed. And by the end of it, we’d definitely be dragging—and just hoping the other people would finally go home already so we could go to bed. I mean, it’s late already.
Lunch is so much more leisurely, so much more attuned to the fact you are retired and actually have more unaccounted-for time. And counter intuitively, the lunches also somehow give you a bit of something that has been missing in retirement—a sense of structure.
Like many of us who are no longer working regularly, I sometimes have difficulty remembering exactly what day it is. With no imposed schedule framing my week, no school or office calendar, I wonder: is today Tuesday or maybe it’s Thursday?
But no, if it’s Wednesday, it must be lunch-with-Jock day. If it’s Friday, it’s Korean-barbecue-with-Bob day.
According to an internet search, lunch is important because it “provides the body and mind with the necessary energy and nutrients to function efficiently throughout the afternoon and evening. It helps maintain focus, concentration and productivity, while also preventing overeating later in the day.”
Yeah, sure. But we regular lunchers know what’s really most important about lunch is that it gives a focal point to days that can have no focus. Doomscrolling and doing the laundry, watching TV, refilling prescriptions and even going for walks all have their merits. But only lunch tells you what day it is.