Beware the rise of the competitive packed lunch

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The writer is the FT’s food critic

I suppose it was inevitable. I awake to news that yet another of the simple joys of my youth has become a performative, aspirational pursuit. First, riding a bike was appropriated by the Mamils (middle-aged men in Lycra), then swimming in rivers became a middle-class obsession and now the packed lunch has become “white collar”.

According to the Grocer Magazine, there has been a 7 per cent increase in bagged lunches taken to work over the past year, with office workers leading the trend. They are blaming the cost of living crisis; I hope it’s the start of a national awakening. If the managerial cadres are turning away from the identikit, mayo-lubed Franken-sandwich en masse, I will stand on the sidelines and applaud. But I doubt it.

Instead, like everything else, we will first build an overhyped trend and then turn it into a scrambling race to outperform each other. “My sandwiches are entirely organic”; “Our gardener grows the cress . . . ”; and at last, inevitably: “Our cleaner laid the eggs herself.”

But there is still time. I have faith we can step back from the precipice and find a way out of this competitive doom spiral. And that way is matpakke.

To understand matpakke, you first need to understand a little about lagom. In Sweden, the word refers to a profound belief, at a culture-wide level, in the notion of sufficiency — the correct or adequate amount. This leads to a noble pursuit of balance and moderation in everything. In Norway, there is a similar motivating spirit behind the national packed lunch.

These lunches originated in a system of free school meals launched in 1932 called the Oslo breakfast. It required no cooking and was supplied free to all — including bread, cheese, milk, half an orange and half an apple. This simple, unembellished meal was a universal provision, and proudly displayed an entirely non-competitive standard of adequacy. Rich kids couldn’t get a better breakfast, poor kids wouldn’t have a worse one. The food was precisely sufficient.

Today, the noble ideals of the Oslo breakfast persist in matpakke. Despite the encroaching decadence of alien customs, such as going out to lunch, most Norwegians observe the traditions of the state-mandated half-hour lunch break, when every worker from floor sweeper to chief executive will unwrap a wax-paper package containing two sandwiches and one piece of fruit. Being Norwegian, the sandwiches are open-faced and use a modest single slice of bread each — a specially manufactured sheet of greaseproof paper (mellomleggspapir) is placed between the sandwiches to separate them.

The fillings are simple: cheese, ham, salami, liver paste or jam. It would, after all, be wrong to include any ostentatious condiments — aside from the occasional pickle or sliced red pepper — and antisocial to produce something that was more pleasurable than that of your colleagues. It would be kind of insulting if your lunch was more temptingly delicious than your neighbour’s . . . if you “looked forward to it” for any reason other than peckishness. I can’t think of any other situation in the world where the driving imperative is for the food to be reassuringly dull.

This, I firmly believe, is the way forward for the rest of us. The damage to social cohesion and workplace harmony through competitive lunch-bagging could be nothing short of catastrophic. A proper lunch break, some stilted conversation and a state-approved cheese and pickle bap or sarnie might well be our best solution.

Let us pack our Tupperwares every morning with pride. Modest ingredients in adequate portions. Not expensive, not “indulgent”, not clever or creative — and let us march forward into a new, egalitarian lunchtime. 

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