Do you eat your work lunch al fresco, al desko, or not at all?

This is an excerpt from our weekly food newsletter, The Boil Up.

I was on placement at a secondary school in central Tāmaki that someone said it: “Imagine if people chose their jobs based on what their lunches would look like.” Laughter, followed by a forlorn, “no one would want to be a teacher.”

It seems no one wants to be a teacher anyway, but my colleague was right. One glance around the stained Tupperware containers of Hello Fresh leftovers and sachets of Ben’s microwave rice would be enough to turn off even the keenest young educator, although as I later learned, this school where teachers actually congregated in the staffroom to eat their lunches was one of the good ones.

During my short teaching career I survived primarily on caffeine, adrenalin and the bag of almonds in the top drawer of my desk. I know I ate lunch, but it was always a meal snatched during a free period, a sandwich barely tasted while marking essays, peanut butter smeared in the margins. I only survived two and a half years as a teacher (a story for another time), but I left with a clear vision of what I needed from my next job: proper meal breaks. And you know what kind of work generally offers those? Office work.

Despite having been in the workforce for almost 20 years – my first job was at the local Fruit World when I was 14 – I have only twice held roles that could be considered “office work”. Once in my early 20s and again last year, both for periods of less than 12 months. In theory, the boon of office work is that it doesn’t require you to be available to students or customers during specific windows, allowing flexibility around the length and timing of your lunch. In my first office job, I had the luxury of an hour lunch break during which time I could eat a bowl of hot soup and a cheese scone at a café and still have time to go swatch lipsticks at the local Farmers. Obviously this was not a sustainable way of living with a café soup costing an absolute minimum of $13.90 (at my then-regular, Potpourri Vegetarian Café in Dunedin) and I would usually eat my microwaved leftovers in the staffroom while chatting – or resolutely avoiding chatting, depending who was around – with my colleagues, just like everyone else.

This culture was replicated in my next office job, years later and at the other end of the country, although the milder Tāmaki weather meant that my gaggle of disenfranchised colleagues would often take our meals outdoors, to the little enclave of benches behind our building, an oasis in a sea of parking lot, a place to sip milky tea from our carefully transported staffroom mugs and spill the tea on whatever fresh hell had erupted at the latest team meeting. Whatever lunch I brought, the real treat of these work lunches was the sense of camaraderie, the sweetness of knowing that this was the only window in our working day where we could do as we pleased and we were choosing to spend it with one another.

What job would I choose if I really did base my decision on the reality of a classic workday lunch? As a freelancer, I could really have whatever I like for lunch, can eat at any time, go anywhere. But most of the time I end up eating leftovers or assembling various bits onto a plate, something like a few slices of cheese, cucumber sticks, a chopped nectarine, a cold sausage. Sometimes I take myself out for noodles or a bánh mì from Mug’n’Bowl, or I forget how to look after myself and have a gelato for lunch then wonder why I feel lightheaded come 3pm.

Even though I feel very blessed every day I am in charge of my own time and tummy, there is something I kind of miss about eating a cheese sandwich at my desk while the Rainbow Group holds court in my classroom, or forsaking my packed salad to share a box of Coles Ultimate Cookies that a colleague brought back from holiday in Australia. It’s nice to be able to chew my food thoroughly without worrying about the bell ringing or my manager’s eyes rolling, but I find I hardly need to take a full half hour when it’s just me. It’s nice, but it’s a little lonely.