34 Minutes? by Matthew Fort
They were nearly an hour over luncheon. Course followed “course in disconcerting abundance, while Colonel Blount ate and ate, turning the leaves of his book and chuckling frequently. They ate hare soup and boiled turbot and stewed sweetbreads and black Bradenham ham with Madeira sauce and roast pheasant and a rum omelette and toasted cheese and fruit. First they drank sherry, then claret, then port. ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to have little nap’,” says Colonel Blount in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.
In less than an hour! Blimey. That’s going it a bit. Cramming that lot into less than several hours suggests a degree of vulgar excess. Lunch is to be loved. Lunch is to be lingered over. To lunch properly is to loiter with intent.
Waugh was writing about the tail-end of the greatest era for lunching, the reign of Edward VII, himself no nibbler. Sir Harold Nicolson, MP, diplomat, journalist, writer, husband to Vita Sackville-West, wrote eloquently of the dietary demands in that time of gastronomic exuberance (at least for the upper middle and upper classes), in his essay “The Edwardian Weekend”. He depicts it as a leisurely peregrination from one Lucullan blow-out to the next.
This was not remarkable, as the diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart and Sir Henry “Chips” Channing and the letters of Waugh himself make clear. Why, even that rather austere, intimidating figure Virginia Woolf wrote eloquently about the charms of lunch in her lengthy essay “A Room of One’s Own”. And that doughty up-holder of Edwardian culinary standards, Lady Jekyll, included recipes in her book Kitchen Essays (1922) for “A Winter Shooting-Party Luncheon” (game pâté; Boston baked beans; burnt house cake); “Luncheon for a Motor Excursion in Winter” (potage a L’Écossaise; stuffed salmon rolls; winter cake; and “a nice little selection for the dessert”); and “Country Friends to a Christmas Shopping Luncheon” (oysters au gratin or Malay curry of prawns; braised veal with a “moist purée of sorrel”; a salad course; gaufrettes or waffles or a compote of fruit).
When I began a serious job as an advertising copywriter in the early Seventies, the vestiges of this splendid Edwardian tradition lingered on here and there, in the business world in particular, where lunches were measured in terms of bottles (per head). A one-bottle lunch was regulation. A two-bottle lunch was perfectly acceptable. A three-bottle lunch not unknown. Needless to say, these took rather more than 60 minutes to consume.
But these were short-lived affairs compared to those enjoyed in my favoured profession. Taking clients to lunch was the gustatory equivalent of a double marathon, that would start with a sharpener at midday and end in a blur of amiability and concord at… well, whenever. In 1973, I remember joining the agency box at Lord’s for the third test match against the West Indies. The Windies declared at 652 for eight after one of the most exhilarating displays of batting by any team ever. Garry Sobers, Rohan Kanhai and Bernard Julien put the England attack to the sword, each scoring centuries. And I don’t remember a single ball or stroke. Lunch began at 10am when the first bottle of Bollinger was opened. Consumption continued at a suicidal rate all day under a scorching sun. At one point, I had my arm around the shoulder of the chief general manager of Lloyds Bank, swearing eternal friendship. The next day I woke with a 22-carat, chromium-plated, turbocharged hangover.
Even if such Rabelasian jollity wasn’t an everyday affair, proper lunches were seen as part and parcel of the creative process. On the rare occasions I was trapped at my work station, I observed the proper rituals. I’d make sure that I had a cold, stuffed quail and salad from Fortnum & Mason, and some well-ripened Camembert from Roche Brothers, washed down by half a bottle of claret. Ah, such, such were the days.
Now, alas, such sensible, civilised practices are long gone. By the time I left advertising in 1989, lunch was under fire. A new puritanism was stalking offices and boardrooms. Up and coming young thrusters began to spend more time in the gym than they did at the restaurant table. A gently rounded tummy was no longer seen as a sign of experience and authority. And now you have to be trim, ripped and bright-eyed from inner wellness rather than from lunch.
But is it worth it? According to smallbusiness.co.uk in June 2017, we Brits spent 34 minutes over lunch on average, with 52 per cent of workers skipping lunch altogether. Of those that do eat lunch, 37 per cent rarely leave their offices at lunchtime, while 12 per cent, apparently, don’t eat lunch at all, sad souls.
Compare that to time spent eating and drinking daily in France (two hours 11 minutes), and Italy (two hours five minutes). Even their kids get one-and-a-half to two hours’ lunch break. If it’s any consolation, the Germans are worse
than us. It’s estimated that they gobble their lunches in 15–30 minutes. But they work fewer hours. We Brits work more hours than anyone else in Europe. And the Germans and French have a higher productivity per head than the UK, and Italy is only just behind. So more hours worked do not equal greater productivity; but they do equal less lunch.
Thank heavens I was able to turn lunch from a vocation into a calling when I became food editor and restaurant critic of The Guardian. Lunch became research. Lunch meant gathering data. Lunch was food for thought. That may seem reducing a glorious ritual to a prosaic process, but it was anything but. It was astonishing how many friends I found I had when the magic words “expense account” were bandied about. And given a choice of a Pret sandwich and a packet of crisps at your desk and eating three courses in a restaurant, which would any civilised person choose? Small wonder that restaurant critics are so reluctant to give up their jobs.
But it’s not only the opportunities for indulgence that we’ve lost through the downgrading of lunch, pleasurable though that might be. Lunch has its own business and social rewards. When else did you get a chance to gather personal information about a client? How many children? Names? Domestic arrangements? Hobbies, passions or obsessions? Strengths and weaknesses of character? Any or all of these could be useful in managing a business relationship or helpful in negotiations. Far from being for wimps, lunch is for shrewd, business-like people.
A few months ago, Robin Dunbar, head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, and winner of the Huxley Memorial Medal (2014), wrote an article in The Financial Times pointing out that alcohol promoted sociability and our ability to socialise is one of the dynamics behind human progress. Alcohol is an essential part of lunch, as I see it. And so lunch lies at the heart of our development. Lunch is much more than just lunch. It’s a meeting place, a humane bridge, a social adhesive, a communications hub, a refresher from the sturm und drang of work and life.
During the negotiations in Paris between the Americans and the North Vietnamese to end the Vietnam War, the French, who were hosting the talks, insisted they continue over lunch and dinner, much to the initial disgust of the Americans. Later, however, one of the US delegation acknowledged the part these meals had played in arriving at a treaty. “It’s difficult,” he said, “to threaten to bomb someone back into the Stone Age when you’ve just passed them the salt.”
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