Lunch is one of the great institutions of modern America. We may eat it on the run and at our desks but there’s no denying that lunch deserves its place in the sun.
As a stalwart member of GW’s Urban Food Task Force which, among other things, encourages our students to eat good, healthy noontime meals, I think about lunch a lot. The food trucks that clog the campus of late give me pause, as do the limited options available for undergrads who keep kosher or observe halal. And don’t get me started on the crowds that pour into Whole Foods or any of the other neighborhood food establishments, transforming the prospect of a nice lunch into a waiting game.
Though my concerns are present-day ones, it turns out they have a history. As “Lunch Hour NYC,” a brand new exhibition at the New York Public Library, makes vividly clear, street foods, crowds and informality have been with us ever since lunch was first invented in and by an industrializing America.
Bound up with the rhythms of the workaday world, the lunch hour took off, generating a wealth of paraphernalia and foodstuffs: carts, fast foods, luncheonettes and lunchrooms, metal lunch boxes and shiny Horn & Hardart Automats; pretzels, hot dogs, pizza, knishes and the soon-to-be ubiquitous tuna sandwich.
After taking stock of this exhibition, I venture to say that we’ll no longer take lunch for granted.
