08 Aug, 2012
A bit about those lunch tweets – and some food for thought
Posted by andrea tomkins in: Challenge me, challenge you|Recipes and Food
Some of you may know me well enough that I have been known to embark on small projects purely for my own personal amusement. The Hourly Photo projects started that way, as did our now-annual Family Advent Calendar. And come to think of it, so did the Moments of Bliss, the Sugar Fast, Couch-to-5K, the Trust Experiment, and even the cookies we baked in the car a couple of weeks ago. I don’t do it for the clicks, I do it for the kicks. And I guess I like to keep busy.
My latest little whim has been concerning my lunches. Some of you may have already seen a photo or two flit by already.
Allow me to indulge in a bit of backstory for a moment.
I find it a wee bit annoying when people who don’t know very much about Twitter insist that tweets are only about the mundane events of people’s personal lives. Admittedly, to some extent this is true. Many of us let tedious tweets escape into the larger world. And I don’t entirely disagree. For example, I see WAY too many tweets about the contents of diaper blowouts – and I would prefer not to see those – but this does not summarize everything that Twitter is about. Twitter is more. It’s news, politics, gossip, information, relationships, community, charity, therapy, and then some. If you are a current-events junkie, and if you like to be the first to know what’s going on internationally or even right down the street from you, Twitter might be your tool of choice. You just have to know who to follow.
The anti-Twitter argument is often prefaced with statements such as: “I don’t care about what people have for lunch!” And then the person will denounce Twitter as an utter waste of time.
But you know what, I want to know what you had for lunch, especially if it’s a great recipe, a good food find, or a good restaurant that I may visit some day. Besides, knowing what someone had for lunch is personal and revealing. This is something I’ve wondered about: what does a person’s lunch say about them? For example, what would you think about someone who voluntarily ate these meals almost every day:
- beans in a can, eaten out of the can
- an organic portebello mushroom burger on a homemade multigrain bun with baby greens they’ve grown themselves
- a bag of chips and a pop
- homemade soups and stews, made ahead of time and frozen in individual serving sizes
- take out from a fast-food place, eaten cold, in the car (Double Downs, Chick-fil-A, Quadruple Bypass Burgers etc.)
- Bento Box lunches made to look like Japanese cartoon characters
I think we can all agree that there is such a thing as a healthy lunch. And that healthy lunches contain items from the different food groups with emphasis on whole foods (especially produce) that are processed as little as possible. So what do sub-par lunches say about the people eating them? That they don’t care about themselves? Can’t afford to eat well? Don’t know how to cook? Don’t make the time to shop and prepare something good to eat? Care more about comfort and convenience than health? Maybe there are people out there who grew up eating beans and/or beefaroni out of cans, and that makes them feel happy, so they continue to do so into adulthood. Anyway, the reason why is neither here nor there, I just think it’s interesting.
Personally, when I’m eating a bag of chips for lunch (and it has happened) I see it as a personal failure: to myself, my health, my body, and even to my family … because my kids are going to be the ones taking care of me when I’m an old lady.
I know it’s only lunch, but STILL. You get my point right?
I find it inspiring to look at other people’s great lunches and it encourages me to do better with mine. There have been many many days these past two months that I have been very tempted to slather a layer of peanut butter on big fat bagel and hoover it up while standing over the sink, but I don’t, because I know I will be tweeting it and thus someone is watching. I can see how many people are clicking on each photo, and this is just enough motivation to help me eat a little bit better. (I urge you to try it out and see for yourself. Do YOU want the world to know you scarfed down a bag of chips for lunch? I think not.)
I started on a whim and at first my goal was to document entirely breadless lunches: soups, salads, anything as long as it didn’t contain bread. And then we went camping and I decided it would be too hard to make do without bread – so I blew it for awhile. Oh well. I am now back on the bandwagon!
The set of photos I’ve posted so far are pretty revealing. You can see what days I have my act together, the days I slip, the days I probably have a fridge full of food and the others when I’m just scraping by (cucumbers and blue cheese? Yuck). But as I look back on the 50 lunches I’ve eaten I realize I do ok for the most part.
Anyway, yes. There is it. My lunch tweets may be a little self-indulgent, but you know what, I don’t care. :)
So for the next while I’m going to continue snapping and posting them to the Flickr page (but not here on the blog). I will tweet them as I eat them, one a day, and as soon as I figure out how I will tag each them #dailylunches in case anyone out there wants to join me for lunch. :)