Bread alone

I have found that one of the easiest steps to taking control of your finances is to make your own lunch, or to figure out how to charge lunch to someone else, or to a business. Now, I don’t mean writing off lunch as a business expense. That’s just a discount. I am talking no charge. Nothing on the P&L. Out and out free.

Ok. I’m already off track.

Point is, I have solidified the habit of bringing in my own lunch since I started my new job in April. The hope is that it will have a real impact on my ability to save some scratch.

Let’s not hide truths here: Mrs Squatty has been making my lunch most days so that we can save some money. Regardless of how it gets in the bag, porting one’s lunch from home is one of those habits that is always noted as a great “ounce of prevention” idea. It puts you in a class of people that are plucky, upstanding, trustworthy, and good providers. It’s a salt-of-the-earth kind-of “I vote every year” type-of habit. What endears a character more to an audience than seeing him open up a well-worn, brown paper bag and pull out a tidy bologna and cheese on white bread?

Unfortunately, when you bring in your lunch, you miss out on all the adventure in getting lunch. It takes some balls to arrive at the mid-point in your day without knowledge of your sustenance into the afternoon. You are letting the world know that you take all comers; you’re open to experience; your digestive system grabs life by the horns and screams, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself!” or “Ich bin ein Berliner!” or something.

In terms of issuing challenges to my own digestive system, I have always enjoyed cafeteria food. I have realized that since becoming a lunch-bringer, I long for the occasional steam table. At times when I have had access to a cafeteria, I have made regular use of it. Some people would find eating cafeteria food on a consistent basis a little hard to swallow (ahem), but I have relished it (alright, sorry). For my part, I enjoy all the options starkly laid out in front of me. If you go to a deli or a restaurant and read something off a menu, you are using those higher levels of abstraction that we have probably only developed in the past 1,000 centuries or so. But if you are standing in a cafeteria, seeing all the food laid out in front of you, there’s no abstraction or imagination to muddle things up. The food is exactly how you’ll get it. Smell and sight are drawing you. It’s all primal. It harkens to those times of yore when we were monkeys, or fish. “Dream like a monkey, eat like a fish,” that’s what my Dad always used to tell me. (NB: my father has never said that.)

In a past life, at a past workplace, my colleagues and I used to make regular visits to the cafeteria upstairs in our building. It was the classic cafeteria look, feel, and fare: plenty of stainless steel, cheap furniture, and cheap comfort food. It was reassuring to have somewhere that you knew you could get a slice of meatloaf, a side of Jell-o™, or a bowl of mac & cheese. In essence, it was a great nexus of the lunch dialectic: you were able to have the thrill of an ad-hoc meal, but the comfort of little variance in choice.

Consequently, all walks of life were seen up in the cafeteria. You had the seven-figure-earning brokers and the front-desk guards all teetering on the same “broiled chicken or baked ziti” decision. It brought the masses, and it distilled the essence of hunger out of people. But that does not mean it was a denizen for the simple-at-heart. The cafeteria had the power to attract visionaries who saw the parts and imagined the greater whole. It would show the true colors of their taste buds, like a bowling ball of consciousness striking the pins of your soul... in the wind.

One day, up in the cafeteria, there was a relatively young, relatively attractive woman in line two people in front of me perusing the main course offerings. Dressed like she’s on her way up, it was assured that she was just giving cursory eye service to the station until she made her way to the salad bar. But then she paused near the hot turkey entree (veggies, cranberry sauce, the works). She pointed to it and asked one of the servers:

"Can i get some of that on a Kaiser roll?"

Sure. No problem, nodded Sergei, the Russian guy who worked at that station. This was a pretty common request. He went over to the sandwich area, got a Kaiser roll, and came back to the turkey. He cut the roll open and grabbed three or four thick cuts from the heat pan. But she had already upped the ante.

"Wait! Could you put a little gravy on each side first?"

Sergei put the turkey down, spread a little gravy on each side of the roll, and then put the turkey slices in the sandwich.

"...and a little cranberry sauce."

A helping of cranberry sauce goes on the roll. Sergei looks up for approval.

"yeah.... Do you have any mayo?"

Lighting strikes. She had now vaulted out of the primal sense. This young upstart had grasped that abstract forethought, that creative je ne se qua, that brings us closer to The Creator. Sergei points to the sandwich and raises his eyebrows with some trepidation to confirm her request.

"right," she answers. "mayo."

He returns to the sandwich station and gets the bottle of mayo, brings it back to the sandwich, and squirts a swirl or two onto the cranberry sauce. He looks up for approval. She makes a comparable swirling motion with her finger noting that she could go for a little more mayo. Sergei complies, looking a little troubled.

“and a little extra gravy."

With the extra gravy, the woman in line directly in front of me looks back with a face that says she wants to share this moment of horror with someone. I couldn't help her out. The artisan, with her bold and triumphant addition to sandwich studies, had just rocketed into the top 5 of the most attractive women I have ever seen.

The person currently holding the #1 spot on that list packs my lunch for me. Were I to request such a sandwich from her, I might find it in my lunch pail in the morning, but likely including a request that this not turn into a regular habit.

It is surely no longer a regular habit at the old cafeteria on the storied heights of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Shortly before my move to Baltimore, the massive, Italian man who served as the head chef there left, and was replaced by a milquetoast foodmeister who was as nervous and dry as bad ham. The cafeteria quickly became a replica of the modern sandwich stands that dot Midtown and are indecipherable from the next. So I staged a massive protest by mailing delicious meatloaf dinners to the Manhattan Borough President (and charging him a modest $6.25) every day until I was appointed the head of the New York Comfort Food Awareness Council and presented with the key to the city.

Heady days, indeed.