Lunchtime after the pandemic: Less harried, more homemade?

Even before the pandemic, work lunch wasn’t what it used to be. Gone were the days of the three-martini power lunch expensed to the company account; in many cases, people had even stopped taking half-hour breaks away from the glow of a computer screen. (New business models sprung up around this slow decay: At The Counter’s WeWork space, Sweetgreen delivered scores of salads to the common area every day, eliminating the need for us office drones to set foot outside the building.) This week, Quartz asked two historians about lunch at work after the pandemic. They predicted that people will make their own lunches more often, having woken up to the fact that a $13 tossed salad can be replicated at home for a fraction of the price. And maybe—just maybe—we’ll see the return of lunch as a social meal. “Part of the reason that we go to work, part of the thing that makes work okay, is the other people there,” historian Megan Elias told the publication.