What, asks G2's food pages today, do you get when you cross a food-obsessed culture with a global recession? One answer, it seems, is that people are once again embracing packed lunches, using leftovers and moving away from overpriced lunchtime fare such as 'no bread sandwiches' and the like. Sales of lunch boxes are up 68% on last year at Robert Dyas, while Thermos, of flask-making fame, are reporting a 30% sales increase over the last year.
Assuming these sales figures haven't been massaged by publicity-hungry purveyors of portable food receptacles, I can't help but wonder whether the people who bought them have actually used them yet. It is, after all, well-known that despite the coffee-table cookbook boom of recent years, people still don't actually cook that much.
Meanwhile though, the Love Food Hate Waste campaign has somehow managed to scientifically calculate that £1bn worth of homemade meals (there must be some folk out there cooking then) are being thrown out every year; meals which we could be finishing off for lunch the next day, or if we don't fancy the same meal two days in a row, could be frozen to eat at a later date. Could this be the nudge all those would-be packed lunchers need to get started?
I try to take my own lunch to work fairly regularly, mostly to stop myself making terrible spur-of-the-moment food decisions when I'm hungry like the wolf. I'll pop down to the canteen with a salad box in mind, get a bit chilly in the corridor on the way, and end up demolishing a plate of pie and mash. This never happens when I bring in a packed lunch. Like some sort of (now surely outdated?) Guardian hack stereotype, I have been known to peel the lid off my tupperware and slowly munch through home-sprouted mung beans and brown rice. But this was no hair shirt of the packed lunch world. There were other goodies in the box: fresh chilli, toasted seeds, avocado, beetroot, lime juice, wasabi, tamari, mmmmm. Obviously, though, it's impossible to sustain such levels of virtue.
One of the secrets to hassle-free packed luncheoning seems to be to cook stuff for tea that you'll want to eat again, at work, the next day. But which dishes stay the most appetising after a day or two in Tupperware?
