after 40 all meals are horror

This person’s problem can be solved by a sandwich. Takes like 3 minutes to make, or can be prepped earlier, no cooking necessary, has color, is fresh, not frozen, beats any fast food meal in price and quality. Also can even be healthy if you shop wisely. Can be different every day. Can be hot or cold. The possibilities are endless. Sandwiches are the best.

Good Lord I am happy I can handle my shit and not have to publicly post my executive dysfunction for the planet to see.

It's called a sandwich.

Here in the Netherlands a lot of people just eat sandwiches. I usually take them with me to work. Not a lot of effort

You can just... not? Having two larger meals a day isn't that weird.

Cooking takes SO MUCH TIME when you're single. But eating out is so expensive. It sucks.

I disagree. I like cooking and since I'm working from home I can make something nice and fast at home for lunch. But I probably would have agreed back then when I worked at the office.

Someone needs to raise their sandwich game.

I just cook bigger portions for dinner and eat that as lunch

There is another option.

Just going to put this out there, cook too much the previous night, don't eat all the dinner you cooked. Place the remainder into some form of container; transport said container to work with you the next day.

Lunch is sorted when you make your dinner!

Yes, eventually it ends when you’re promoted to middle management and you have to forage for granola bars and cookies during the few seconds you get between meetings. Stay an IC for as long as you can.

£4 sounds pretty cheap if it's a decent meal

This thread just oozes of early adults that don't understand how to spend 30 minutes preparing meals

I mostly eat leftovers from last night's dinner for lunch.

If you want to minimize cleanup and effort, just use a rice cooker.

• Costs 30€
• Put in rice and lentils at a ratio of your chosing, cook with oil and salt
• Optionally spices and tomato paste
• Put in frozen veggies either in a steaming basket or directly in the rice
• Chuck in an onion (quartered if you're lazy) and some garlic
• Yoghurt on the side

Congratulations you now have a healthy, cheap meal you can make at home or at work. If you eat directly out of the cooker you only need to clean your spoon. No cutting board needed either.

Imagine your biggest realization as an adult being a wrong opinion.

Look I'm not saying that cooking your own lunch is a prerequisite for being an adult. However complaining about the quality of prepared food while not acknowledging you could just cook is sure as hell immature.

The trick is being able to eat the same meal for the entire day. Cook once and eat it throughout the day. lol

Most of my lunches are leftovers, but many of them are things like a burger or a bratwurst that I can cook with little effort. Or I can buy something.

Imagine complaining about £4 for lunch, I'm lucky if I get out for under $20.

I look forward to lunch every day. I make myself a wrap with some sort of oven cooked filling and a bunch of fresh veggies and some apple slices and a small bag of wasabi peas for dessert.

Some of us are given free meals to eat in our paid meal breaks.

Nothing fancy though. Most times, the chef only makes a starter or a dessert. Rarely both.

Honestly they should just make nutrition bricks. Just combining nutrients into a brick. It could even be modular so you can add/remove various nutrients based on your nutritional needs. The perfect life would be working for the nutrition brick manufacturer and then going home to eat some nice nutrition bricks.

Learn how to cook. It’s not that hard to throw something together that’s good after being microwaved. The other day I made some bitter-orange chicken with rice. It was 30 minutes waiting and 4 minutes coating the chicken in the pan with the sauce.

Sandwiches are never a bad option.

In Brazil, if you work more that 6hs a day, the company have to give you lunch. The majority of them, give you a pre paid debit card that can be used in restaurants. This mean that they are a lot of money there that can be used in restaurants, so any office building have lots of restaurants around.

From my union contract, I get 40R daily to lunch, and the restaurant I go they serve "prato feito" (beans, rice, salad, meat) for 25, and use the rest for some icecream or to eat something with my wife at weekends.

It's not even an age thing, but more an economic issue, I never ran into this as an issue when the cost of eating out was affordable. Don't feel like prepping lunch the night before? Screw it, I'll pickup something during my lunch break for $3-4. But now that $3-4 is $10+

Is this some sort of British joke that I am too Indian to understand?

Edit: There was a bit of miscommunication it seems. My comment was on the food themselves and not the price.

There's a variety of lunches that are cheap and insanely easy though:

• Stir fry with leftover rice, an egg, and some frozen veggies
• Sandwich with a piece of fruit or some veggies
• Leftover soup heated up on the stove (or in the microwave if ya nasty)
• Cold pasta dishes like pasta salad with leftover protein thrown on top
• Charcuterie plate with cold cuts, crackers, cheeses, and jams
• Salad with cold leftover proteins
• Leftover fried chicken straight out the fridge, as God intended

Like sure, some of these things rely on having leftovers laying around to dress up a bit, but I think that's a reasonable thing to expect of most people.

Me, living in France, where a cafeteria room is mandatory, 1-2h long lunchs are the norm and your employer has to give you at least 4-5€/day to buy lunch:

If you're not eating a croque monsieur for lunch, that's your fault, and you deserve to be miserable

I've seriously considered buying MREs because I can't be bothered to meal prep.

Do people not eat salads? Like some spinach, a nice vinaigrette, some nuts, and maybe a little sliced baked chicken, with a few raspberries or something?

Yes, it does end.

Everything bagel, cream cheese, provolone, tomato/cucumber in that order. Eat open faced. You're welcome.

A Br*tish person complaining about lunch, that’s rich.

Maybe try having a proper one, like the rest of Europe, and you will find the answer to all of your complaints.

What's wrong with Kramer's method of just bringing a sleeve of crackers to eat at work?

I don't understand; could somebody please explain?

Well, what do you want to eat? I guess if you don't want to prepare your own food, those are the only options, whether at work or at home. Otherwise, make whatever you want and take it to work. Cook more food than you need for your dinner and take the leftovers. Make a salad (tons of options for them), make a sandwich. You don't have to eat canned soup, make some nice homemade soup and freeze a bunch of individual servings to grab and take. The possibilities are endless.

Grow the fuck up.

Microwaving some leftovers might be an option. You get the great food you put effort into making, without actually having to make the effort at lunchtime.

Really? I've been an adult for quite a while and I always look forward to lunch (all meals, actually). Plenty of quick, simple, and appealing meals to make.

I think something that is missing in the minds of the "but you could just..." posters here is that the mindset of the OP doesn't always come from laziness, immaturity, or the inability to understand how to pack a sandwich, it sometimes comes from crippling or barely functional depression.

I work from home and the thought of even making a sandwich most days in the middle of the day is just too much. I don't want to make a sandwich; I want to go back to bed for eight to ten years and I agree that lunch is the fucking worst.

(But so is breakfast, and dinner, and all of the meetings, and work, and life generally speaking, etc.)

Shit take.

It’s frustrating as an adult with ARFID/eating disorders. I can’t bring myself to eat leftovers because I worry that they are contaminated. I’ve thrown away so much food because I won’t reuse a pasta sauce jar if it has been opened.

A lot of the common “easy” meals are things that I absolutely will not eat - spaghetti, canned veggies, ground beef. Sometimes I struggle with eating ramen. It’s fucking embarrassing but I literally cannot help it. I will gag and puke if my brain decides I can’t eat something.

Breakfast is the worst. Sausage, ham, pancakes, cereal, eggs, hash browns, or toast. Want a breakfast burrito? Take a normal burrito, add scrambled eggs. Want a breakfast sandwich? Swap out sliced bread with english muffin or bagel, optionally add an egg.

Screw that. I'm having leftover spaghetti for breakfast.

This is a first world problem

If only not stuffing your face for one meal was a thing.

Where's all the people who loathe breakfast because they aren't hungry until lunch?

Followup question because I'm not one of them. Should we not talk to you until you've had your morning coffee and cigarette? You know it doesn't give you permission to act like a dickweed to everyone Amanda.

Reading this makes me really angry for some reason.

I skip breakfast so technically lunch is breakfast but it’s then I eat my main meal and it’s always top notch. Who wants to eat a large meal in the evening?

I’ve just started with smoothies. Some greek yogurt(has loads of protein), frozen vegetables, honey, and water(to make it a drink) and it’s already goin’ pretty well.

I agree, it’s awful to deal with.

Don't eat lunch. When you finally convince your boss to let you work 8 hour days with no break instead of 9 hour days with an awkward 1 hour unpaid break you can do nothing with, that's 1 hour you can spend on yourself that you didn't have before. Also, now you don't have to waste as much of your spare time exercising (to fight weight gain caused by eating 3 meals a day as an adult) so the time savings are twofold.

Where is your tupperware lunch box? hmmm?

As a non-UKer, meal deals are amazing.

Diet shakes :)

Then you realize cooking can be a hobby!

Since COViD, I

• make bread
• “cuisine of the week”, learn to prepare meals from around the world
• replaced teflon cookware with cast iron, stainless and carbon steel, and learned to use them
• got a steel griddle top covering my entire stove and learned to play short order cook. Played a little hibachi chef but made too much mess trying to twirl and flip things
• got a smoker

This weekend I have a 10 lb pork shoulder to smoke. Easily pulled pork for the week and unless my kids come home from school, I’ll likely freeze a bunch

Eating is a chore, I watch a video so i dont think about it, instant noodles are real easy to make at work, toss in some broccoli if youre feeling like a but fancy

Yes georgia, it ends when you marry mr successful and he pays for everything.