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Gary Gary is offline
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Default "Stop Telling Me to Make My Own Lunch" - Slate

Ed Pawlowski wrote:
>
> Gary wrote:
> >If that's a problem with any here, I can copy and post the text. The 2
> >pictures were of some crappy looking homemade sandwich and the other
> >was some super nice purchased sandwich. The article basically telling
> >you that you don't really save lunch money by bringing your own lunch
> >to work.

>
> They lie. Are they going to me how going out for a $5 to $10 lunch is
> cheaper than a leftover chicken thigh and scoop of mashed potatoes or
> a similar lunch that I take? I guess I didn't miss much not seeing
> it.


Since you are the third person here that can't see it, here it is all
below. First the picture on top of the article:
http://i63.tinypic.com/2im7xue.jpg

Now the text. Sorry...this old browser shows layout info too. It's
normally hidden but you can read past that and get the entire article.

-----------------------------------------------
Stop Telling Me to Make My Own Lunch

Everyone says brown-bagging it is cheaper and healthier. Theyre
wrong€”but it wouldnt matter if they were right.

By L.V. Anderson

http://i63.tinypic.com/2im7xue.jpg
Photo illustration by Slate. Sandwiches by Lori Sparkia/Thinkstock and
iStock/Thinkstock.

This summer, New York public radio host Leonard Lopate launched a
campaign pushing listeners to quit their takeout habit
and start bringing lunch from home. Citing statistics about how much
money Americans spend—and how many extra
calories they absorb—eating lunch out, Lopate asserted,
“We need to change our lunch habits, together.”

L.V. Anderson

L.V. Anderson is a Slate associate editor.


Lopate’s campaign reflected the conventional wisdom: Bringing
lunch from home is better, for your health and your
wallet, than eating lunch out. You can find online calculators that
take your cost of making a bagged lunch and buying lunch
out—it’s taken for granted that the former is less
expensive than the latter—and tell you how much
you’d end up with if you invested the difference instead. There
are entire books devoted to converting readers to the
bagged-lunch cause. The subtly titled Huffington Post essay
“Buying Your Lunch Is a Terrible Idea. The End. No
More Debates” has been Liked on Facebook more than 14,000 times.

I’m sick of this bring-your-lunch consensus. It’s based on
questionable assumptions about what’s inside
your brown bag and how much you paid for the ingredients. It’s
also obnoxiously moralistic—which makes
sense, since it’s about diet and money, the topics Americans
most enjoy lecturing one another about.

First, the math. It’s probably true that the average takeout
lunch is more expensive than the average homemade lunch,
but the numbers vary a ton depending on what you’re eating.
Sure, if you compare a homemade turkey sandwich (the
HuffPo writer’s lunch of choice) to a Chipotle burrito bowl,
you’ll come out ahead when you brown-bag it. But
if you try to replicate that Chipotle meal at home, guacamole and all,
your savings are a lot slimmer. (The Billfold’s
Mike Dang calculated that a homemade Chipotle bowl cost $4.03 when
assembled from cheap ingredients from Trader
Joe’s, but (a) most grocery stores are more expensive than
Trader Joe’s, and (b) Dang budgeted a quarter of an
avocado per serving, which is not nearly enough avocado.) And the cost
of ingredients ignores the time and labor it takes to
shop for, cook, and assemble your burrito bowls—time and labor
that you could spend on more lucrative or more
enjoyable activities. If you dislike cooking and have a bit of
disposable income, it might be rational to outsource lunch.

Secondly, homemade lunches are not necessarily healthier than takeout
lunches. That turkey sandwich leaves a lot to be
desired, nutritionally, and even if it’s lower in calories, that
doesn’t make it healthier than a burrito bowl.
It’s true that you have more control over your ingredients when
you make your own lunch, which is especially useful if
you have a dietary restriction, but there are plenty of new fast-food
options that serve vegetables, beans, and whole
grains—like the salad joint Sweetgreen and the Asian rice-bowl
concept ShopHouse. I often patronize Dig Inn, a New
York chain that serves a variety of interesting salads and freshly
cooked vegetables (a selection of three costs only $6).
Obviously, whether you have access to a healthy takeout restaurant
depends on where you work—you’ll have
more choices in a major city. But the notion that takeout food is
intrinsically bad for you grows less and less true with each
passing year.

It should go without saying that the healthfulness and cost of your
lunch depend more on what you eat than on where it came
from. And yet so much of the discourse around lunch insists on the
oversimplified dichotomy homemade lunch good, takeout
lunch bad. The aforementioned HuffPo article derides the notion that
going out for lunch makes some people happy by saying,
“Think of how happy your future children will be when you can
fund their college education, people!” The press
release for the study cited by Lopate quotes an expert saying,
“Going into debt for a tuna sandwich isn’t worth
it,” which is helpful advice if you’re an insane straw
man. (The study, by the way, found that the average
American spends a total of $936 eating lunch out each year, which
doesn’t strike me as an outrageous sum.) A Time
article on lunch begins with what may be the most condescending lead
of all time:

For years—no, decades—I’ve marveled at the
lunch habits of my friends and colleagues.
Where did they get the money to eat out every day? And even if
they earned decent incomes, why did they
choose to spend them this way?

The brown-bag crowd ignores not only the evidence that homemade
lunches are not necessarily cheaper and healthier than the
alternative, but also the fact that preferences vary from person to
person. Not everyone values saving money more than they
value the pleasure and convenience of a takeout meal. This
doesn’t make people who buy lunch reckless ignoramuses;
it makes them human beings. (Also: If you find that you can’t
save money, it probably has more to do with flat wages
and rising housing, education, and health care costs than with your
profligate lunchtime spending—but that’s a
topic for my colleague Helaine Olen.)

As I write this, I’m eating a lunch I brought from home:
leftovers from last night’s brown rice–tomato
pilaf. As much as I hate the moral smugness of brown-bag evangelists,
I confess that I like bringing lunch from home.
It’s not about cost or health so much as it’s about
feeling like a competent adult—or engaging in
“self-care,” if you prefer. I also feel less wasteful when
I’m not throwing away tons of packaging from
takeout meals. This pilaf tastes fine, and it’s relatively cheap
and healthy, but I wouldn’t want to eat it every day.
Which is why I’ll be going out for lunch tomorrow, and refusing
to feel guilty about it.
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