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.

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

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.

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?

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

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+

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.

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

Where is your tupperware lunch box? hmmm?