Eat In, Or Take Away?

Whether it is drooling over Nigella Lawson spreading avocado on toast, watching Jamie Oliver make a meal in fifteen minutes or following Rick Stein on a culinary voyage around the Mediterranean, we Brits love our cookery programmes. And as the proposed defection of The Great British Bake Off from BBC to Channel 4 proved by generating as many column inches as Brexit, we love our cookery contests too. Television executives have long seen the reality show or fly-on-the wall documentary as audience grabbers, and when combined with our love of food , they know they are on to a winner. 

Many of these shows, whether light-heartedly or more seriously, attempt in some way or another, to educate us about the dangers of high fat, salt laden, highly calorific dishes and encourage healthier home-made alternatives to the ready meal or the takeaway. How effective they are is open to debate: we may be shocked by the amount of sugar in our Starbucks Frappucino, or the amount of salt in our soup from Greggs as revealed in the Channel 4 programme, Tricks Of The Restaurant Trade, but that doesn't seem to put us off spending the best part of £30million pounds on takeaways and fast food every year, food that is generally high in calories, salt, fat and sugar.

A Starbucks Frappuccino contains as much sugar as two cans of Coca Cola - that is to say about 13 spoonfuls.

We all eat out or order takeaways much more than we did when I was growing up. As a child I rarely ate out -and this was largely for economic reasons, my parents simply could not afford restaurant food and takeaways were largely confined to the occasional fish and chip supper. It was only usually on holiday that we ate out, and then it was more likely to be at a Lyons Corner House or a fish restaurant at the seaside than at a 'proper' restaurant. In fact, in my youth, the opportunities to eat out were further restricted by the fact that in most High Streets there was a dearth of eateries. Compare that to today, when wherever you go there are Indian, Chinese and pizza restaurants while town centres and out-of-town shopping centres are dominated by chains like Pizza Hut, Frankie and Bennys, or Prezzo and the like, with McDonalds and Burger King seemingly everywhere. Meanwhile for the snackers, coffee shops such as Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Caffe Nero stand alongside Pret a Manger, Eat and Krispy Kreme to the extent that no shopping expedition is complete without indulging in a coffee and panini, or a fruit cooler and a cake.

We often visited The Royal Fish Bar in Southend when I was young.

As a nation, our eating habits have changed immeasurably over the last forty years - even over the last twenty years. When I started work at Midland Bank in 1976, virtually everyone had breakfast at home, brought sandwiches for lunch and were restricted to a couple of cups of tea or coffee in the office during the day, courtesy of the manager's secretary, or at larger branches one of the messengers, whose job description included the supply of liquid refreshment. Today it is very different: the majority of workers seem to pick up a coffee and bacon roll or a pastry on their way to the office. In 1976, the sight of a takeaway coffee being brought into the office was a rarity, now it is the norm. In 1976, the alternative to a packed lunch brought in from home was a trip to Bartons the bakers, who supplied cheese or ham sandwiches, sausage rolls or tomato soup, and very little more. Pop into your local sandwich bar or coffee shop now and a plain cheese or ham sandwich is rarer than hen's teeth and your choice is more likely to be from such esoteric  combinations as Beetroot and Radish on Rye (Pret a Manger) or Houmous and Falafel (Eat).

In 1976, the idea of an avocado and egg open sandwich would have been unthinkable

 

Having bought their takeaway lunch, workers today are more likely to eat it at their desks than not: it used to be the case that seeing someone eating at their desk was a rarity, now it is the norm. In offices I worked in, eating at one's desk was at one time frowned upon, and when it became more accepted it usually came with some strictures. No hot food for instance, or no 'smelly' food (what counted as smelly was open to interpretation). Some foods defined as messy - even down to biscuits or crisps that might result in crumbs and therefore place more of a potential burden on the cleaning staff, or might attract vermin - have been banned in offices I worked in. In fact, I worked in one office where we did actually find that we had had nocturnal visits from rodents, resulting in an enterprising colleague investing in a mousetrap that did in fact catch one of our furry visitors.

So lunch at our desks has become, for most people, so accepted that the thought of going out at mid-day, eating a leisurely lunch and returning to the office an hour later, is but a distant memory. Work for many people in this 'always connected' world we live in rules their lives almost exclusively from the moment they get up till the moment they go to bed. Even when people take a break, they are never far from their mobile phone or their laptop, we never get away from those emails or calls. In the days before email became ubiquitous, we wouldn't go on holiday, come back to the office and find four-hundred memos waiting for us, but I remember vividly returning from vacation to find that sort of number or emails in my inbox. The fact that we can rarely get away from the office -whether we are physically there or not - contributes to that feeling that if we are not constantly monitoring our mail we are missing something. Just as the phenomenon, the fear of missing out, affects our social lives, so too does the fear of missing some vital piece of work related information affect our working lives.

One day we may look back at the fashion for lunching al desco and remember it as just a fad, but with most employers looking to do more with less, and most employees not wanting to look anything but fully committed and conscientious, I can't see that happening anytime soon. Another reason to be thankful for being retired.