Bag It

According to The NPD Group, a leading market research company, weekday lunches carried from home reached a high point in 2007, with 8.5 million brown bag lunches taken to work. The assumption here is that number has risen.

I’ve started to bag it myself, although my wife’s old lunch carrier probably isn’t the best fit for me. Oh well. The benefits of packing a lunch are obvious and usually can be boiled down to two things: cost savings and health. No argument here. From a health perspective, it’s the portion control that packing gives the brown bagger that I find advantageous.

So far, there is one drawback – the social aspects. There is a certain golf-course bonding that occurs when a group of co-workers venture out for lunch. There is the shared decision making, the back-and-forth of lunch options, the agreement and of course the lunchtime chatter that is best left at lunchtime. The experience is good for the mind (and body), to take a walk and leave work for a while. Sure, such catharsis doesn’t need to be limited to the lunch buyers, but often I think it is.

My charge on my next brown-bag day is to seek a little social levity in between PB&J bites. And also to find a lunch carrying device that better fits my pleats and tassels.