Currie Lee, a 28-year-old resident of Los Angeles who works in retail, has some food allergies, and keeping her lunch unchanged “makes it easy” to eat around them. She did this for “a minimum of six months,” after which she got tired of the meal (and its cost) and, perhaps more important, settled into the new job.Įating the same thing over and over can also simplify the decisions people make about what they put into their bodies. One thing that Neidhardt found soothed her and gave her a measure of control over her day: She picked up a spicy noodle dish called tantanmen from the same ramen restaurant every lunch break. “There were phones ringing constantly and there were people yelling all the time,” she recalls. About a decade ago, she switched jobs, and her new one stressed her out. Sharilyn Neidhardt, a photo editor in New York City, once found solace in regularity. Would she still be eating the salad every day if she hadn’t met him? “Oh heck yeah,” she told me. She liked the simplicity of the formula, but the streak ended when she and her now-husband, who has more of an appetite for variety, moved in together six years ago. Amanda Respers, a 32-year-old software developer in Newport News, Virginia, once ate a variation on the same home-brought salad (a lettuce, a protein, and a dressing) at work for about a year. Many of the people I talked with emphasized the stress-reducing benefits of eating the same thing each day. ![]() Together, their stories form a defense of a practice that is often written off as uninspired. I spoke with about half a dozen people who, at one time or another, have eaten the same thing for lunch every day. In fact, there are many things right with it. So there is nothing wrong with this habit. “If your daily lunch contains a variety of healthful foods,” she says, “relax and enjoy it.” Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University and the author of several books about nutrition and the food industry, says the consequences of eating the same lunch every day depend on the contents of that lunch and of the day’s other meals. Whatever the symbolism, these people’s behavior is not doing them harm. Depending on the context, eating the same thing every day can come off as a moderately charming quirk, an indictment of one’s lack of creativity, or a signal of professional focus and drive. Some of them are public figures whose monotonous diets have been revealed in interviews-they are college-football coaches, fitness-chain CEOs, TV personalities, fashion designers, dead philosophers, Anderson Cooper. Read: The problems home cooking can’t solve Still, loyalists who stick to a single meal for months or years-they are out there. But it’s hard to say for sure how common this really is, since these surveys tend to have been conducted by food purveyors, who might be inclined to exaggerate the ruts that diners are stuck in (and then try to sell them a way out). One of the few existing surveys of people’s eating habits estimated that about 17 percent of British people had eaten the same lunch every day for two years another indicated that a third of Brits ate the same lunch daily. Loomis may be uncommonly dedicated to his lunchtime ritual, but many share his proclivity for routine. Last year, Loomis retired from his job but not his lunch, which he still eats three or four days a week (now with sliced bananas instead of jelly). ![]() “And if you happen to be eating at your desk … it was something that was not too drippy,” he told me, so long as one applied the jelly a bit conservatively. The meal was easy to prepare, cheap, and tasty. His meal underwent slight modifications over time-jelly was added to the sandwich in the final five or so years-but its foundation remained the same. He ate this, he estimates, nearly every workday for about 25 years. ![]() Vern Loomis, a retired structural draftsman in West Bloomfield, Michigan, had a standard office lunch: a peanut-butter sandwich, with various fruit, vegetable, and dessert accompaniments.
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