22. Lunch is expensive and annoying

This is my third year of officially living out of home, despite an attempt in 2020 (I won’t say the P word, we know what 2020 brought for us). After three years, can someone tell me why I still can’t decide what to have for lunch? Lunch is typically one of the best times of the day, I get to eat and have a break from work: what a joy! So why, as the years roll on, is choosing what to make for lunch still one of the most annoying parts of living out of home?

Breakfast is easy, it needs to be filling enough and efficient: cereal is fool-proof and porridge is simple in the colder months. Dinners can be a pain but in the comfort of my home, I can dilly-dally all I want and slap something together with minimum effort (thank you TikTok chefs, I’m looking at you Christian Petracca x). Lunch, however, in my full-time working life, is commonly eaten around people, therefore I feel a need to be perceived as generally healthy, and chucking a Coles cheese and bacon roll into a container like I did in school, just doesn’t fly anymore.

Hate is a strong word, however, I hate thinking of what to have for lunches for the week ahead at work. Perhaps I’m leaning into only being 23, still playing on the fact that I technically don’t have to have my life together and two-minute noodles for the third time that week, is just temporary and is acceptable. The alternative is spending $15 - $18 on a sandwich or focaccia (which entails leaving the house! Jumpscare!) which is always delicious, but depressingly a rip-off when you know it would be easy to make at home and $25 worth of groceries would have gotten you the same result.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told myself “You’ll see something for lunches in the aisle, the supermarket will inspire you”, and proceeded to leave the supermarket with nothing that could even form a midday snack. Also, the supermarket rarely inspires anyone (except for Michael Bublé for his ‘Just Haven’t Met You Yet’ 2014 music video). I’m usually there with my perfectly fine list of ingredients for the week’s dinners, hoping the leftovers might suffice for three lunches for my in-office days.

One the two days I work from home, my lunches are commonly the final serving of dinner leftovers. If there are no leftovers, just picture a 12-year-old boy home alone, rummaging in the pantry, concocting lunch from the strangest mixture of ingredients and flavours, and then inevitably feeling sick and dissatisfied with his efforts: and you get me trying to do lunch. Then again, this is why God invented Uber Eats.