Bringing Lunch from Home is for Losers
Its funny how often I have seen or heard things like this being thrown around, be it from memes and animations such as this, to real life stories of people being looked at as inferior for bringing food from home to have for lunch at work. The truth is that this is pure social conditioning designed to make us consume and feed the machine. Many of “our thoughts” like this are by design and as much as we may not like to admit it we are all susceptible to this kind of manipulation via the social stigma and social identity theory.
But not diving too much into the psychology of it all, lets have a look a quick look at the data and see what’s really happening when you bring food from home.
- Saving LOTS of money, generally a meal made at home is much cheaper. Comparing costs in my local area: a home made meal can be around $1-$2AUD for a large serving, whereas buying a “pub lunch” can be at the $10-$15 AUD, fast foods can run in the $5 AUD plus range depending on what you are eating.
- Taste, there is nothing like the taste of a good home cooked meal and having the meal just how you want it. Others may even come to see what you are eating cause it smells so good.
- You know what is in your food. Anything in your food was put there by you, in your kitchen when you cooked it.
- Less nasties in your food. Yeah we know there is lots of preservatives in the fast foods we buy that can be doing us damage, but we keep eating it anyway… homemade food can reduce this issue. Even if you aren’t getting fast food as such, a look at any of Gordon Ramsays cooking nightmares shows will give you some indication that people are complacent and food makers are nasty when they don’t have to eat it.
- Convenience, you aint gotta go no where to get your food or wait for it to be delivered, stand in line, deal with crappy customer service. What all this adds up to is more lunch time for you to do as you please.
Some may say “yeah but its too much effort to make food for work”, but it doesn’t have to be. As an example, when I make spaghetti for dinner I will use a 65c can of diced tomatoes to beef up the sauce and cook some extra pasta and for no extra effort BAM!!! There is and extra 3-4 servings for next to no cost. Freeze. Take to work. Job done.
Another thing I hear a lot is “Well I can’t be limited to eating the same thing over and over”. Well the variety is only as limited as your imagination. An off the top of my head count came to about 20 meal types that have been successfully tried and tested in the field. Indicating that this kind of thing can be done for a large variety of meals so you won’t be getting tired of what you are eating at all.
“But all the cool kids go out and buy lunch”, yeah well this I cant help with, its subjective and up to the individual. However, I will say this, is it really worth “being cool” and being part of the “in crowd” if its costing you money, time and effort to be part of a social group that would cast you out just because you don’t eat the same as them? Each to their own, but for me it’s a “no thanks mate”.
So after looking at this quick list of what you get for your efforts for bringing lunch from home who Is the real loser here? It would seem that the person going out to buy lunch is losing lots of money, time, and effort to maintain the social norms projected upon them.
The truth of the matter is that it should not matter how you choose to eat your lunch, if you can afford to buy it and/or just want to, great do it. If you want to bring food from home because you can’t afford to buy it or just because you want to then great do it. However, the people who are the real losers are the ones who subscribe to social norms where something as insignificant as where someone’s food comes from can play such a key element of someone’s worth as a human being. Food for thought… or just food 😉