Giles Coren, the Times’s restaurant critic, recently wrote a piece entitled “RIP long lunches: they were for losers anyway.” His argument is based on statistics on lunching habits in France. The French are serious lunchers so any data from them has to be taken seriously. Twenty years ago, it seems, the average French worker took 90 minutes over lunch; now half of them spend less than 30 minutes, which leads Coren to surmise that lunches are getting shorter. Of course it is dangerous to draw conclusions based on statistics. It could easily be that the other half of today’s French workforce spend 150 minutes (or even more) at lunch, which, when added to the shorter lunches taken by the first half, would still maintain the average at a healthy 90 minutes. On this side of the Channel seasoned veterans of the City of London would think nothing of dedicating upwards of two and a half hours to lunching.
It is always dangerous to declare things dead. Nietzsche famously announced that “God is Dead”, but 150 years later many people the world over believe that He (*) is very much alive, and lots of other people, who believed in slightly different versions of Him, are themselves dead to prove it. Mark Twain said that reports of his death had been exaggerated after his obituary was mistakenly published in 1897 and lived for another thirteen years (**). Vinyl, Apple computers and office-based working have all been declared dead at various times, before undergoing miraculous resurrections.
But if Coren is correct about the decline in time spent at lunch, and if the process continues at the same rate, then in another twenty years lunches will last just ten minutes, which is barely enough time to eat a sandwich (queuing time not included). As someone who has written many an Alex cartoon on the subject of lunch (320 of them, according to the search function on my website) I felt I should champion this worthy cause. Further discussion of the issue was clearly called for. And what better place to do it than over lunch?