There ain't no such thing as free lunch.
El Paso Herald-Post, 1938.
There really isn't.
For some reason, the concept of "free" lunches and "free" breakfasts has bothered me for decades. I don't know why, really, but it always has.1 Generally, it's because I'm well aware that "free", in this context, means the financial cost is passed on to somebody else, and nine times out of ten in my experiences the bearer of the cost does so involuntarily.
I don't believe the common unthinking populist phrase that "taxation is theft", but in this case, the free meal is really darned close to it. I've railed here in the past against "free and reduced costs" meals at the local schools, as they aren't free or reduced costs, it's just that property owners pay for negligent parents failing to provide for their kids.
Yes, that's harsh, and that's not what brings me back to this topic, but it's the truth. I'm not opposed to helping the needy, but here nine times out of ten (that phrase again) some tragic "heroic" single mother is packing Young Waif to school hungry because Dudley Dowrong departed the scene after donating his genetic contribution, and now the people who are responsible are picking up the tab. That's okay on a limited basis, but as soon as those whose occupation is Buying Cotton pick up on it, they become to regard it as a right, and soon in fact it becomes one.2 3
Which, again, isn't what brought me back here.
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant.
Just like the meanderings in Guthrie's classic, what I’m here to write about isn't school breakfasts, but office lunch's.
For a reason that I'll omit, I suddenly find myself in the role which made an old Denver lawyer friend of mine supremely crabby when he had it assigned to him, and now I see why. I'm management.
In the new assignment, which snuck up on me, I was instructed I needed to cut expenses that weren't mandated or necessary. And what I found, of course, is that mandated and necessary are in the eyes of the recipient. Put another way, one parent's free and reduced lunch is another's absolute Constitutionally enshrined right.
The expense I rapidly cut was sending our runner to buy groceries for the break room.
Oh, I know what you are thinking, coffee, tea, and the like.4 5
No, I mean real groceries. Soup, relish, hot peppers and hot sauce.
In the over three decades of my current employment and having worked with lots of professionals, I've noted that there's only been a small handful that actually ever ate their lunch at work. There are a few, but it isn't many. Staff people who do, and there are a small handful that have, always packed their lunches, or went to one of the downtown shops to buy lunch and brought it back. Professionals, I'd note, mostly left the office for lunch. Some went home to eat there, often to take care of chores while they were doing it, and some ate downtown. A few, however, ate in the breakroom every day.
I've never done that. When I was younger, I actually walked home to where I then lived, ate a quick light lunch, and returned to work. It helped keep me 30 lbs lighter than I now am. Most of the time now I just don't eat lunch, so if I'm in the office, I'm working. This is against the wise council of my father, who felt that leaving the place of work every day at noon gave you a necessary break. He ate downtown every day with a small group of his friends.
I admire that.
Anyhow, of the professionals that have eaten lunch in the office over the past three plus decades, there are only two that have acclimated to the company buying them lunch or elements of their lunch.
I don't know how this happened.
Long suffering spouse suggest that it was probably started so that there was food for people in an emergency, and I can see that. You're trying a case, and it ran long in the morning as Dudley Dowrong was on the stand for a long time, trying to remember if he has six kids by eight women, or eight kids by six women. So you run back to the office, and you forgot lunch, and don't have time to go buy it. Have some soup, from the company stores.
Well, I wouldn't. I hate soup, for which there's no excuse.
My guess is that is how it started, but it expanded somehow. So for a long time I'll see somebody who hasn't tried a case for eons ordering soup to be picked up by the runner. And in another, a person who brings a gigantic lunch from home everyday spices it up with relish and condiments he had us pick up, that only he uses.6
Quite frankly, this has always pissed me off.
Basically, at that point, you are making every single person who works with and for you buy you lunch. Yes, it's not a major cost, but over the years that means you've taken hundreds or thousands of dollars in food from your coworkers by fiat.
So, with my new found authority and mandate, I ordered it stopped.
...came upon a bar-room full of bad Salon pictures, in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the "free lunch" I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts.
Rudyard Kiping.7
It went badly.
Interestingly, the person I thought might complain did not. The whining from another person was incessant, however.
I'll be frank that I really don't like the passive-aggressive snide type of hostility that some people will exhibit. I prefer that people know that I'm mad when I'm mad, and they almost certainly do. In this instance, after days of it, I blew up in front of the front office starting off with "you're pissing me off".
I yielded, however. People who feel they have the right to impose their lunch menu items back on everyone else now can.
If they dare.
Footnotes:
1. Without knowing for sure, I wonder if its because people who grew up when I did always had it impressed upon them as children that providing a meal for somebody was a big deal. If we received lunch at a friend's home, we were always asked if we had thanked the host for doing so. We were implicitly made to understand that food costs money.
Moreover, snacking just didn't exist where I lived as a kid. People didn't have snacks out, ever. One boyhood friend of mine who is still a close friend had a family that bought 16 oz glass bottles of Pepsi, and the lack of snacks situation was so strong that it always felt like a huge treat to have a bottle of Pepsi there when I was a kid.
2. I'm not one of those who currently feel that everything is wrong with public education, and indeed public education here is good. But this is one cultural difference that may in fact make a difference.
At least with Catholic schools here, there are those who attend who because parishioners have donated the tuition to make it possible. I don't know the lunch situation, but I'd wager this is also the case for some food served there. That's charity, but it's voluntary. Providing free or reduced cost food in public schools is legally enforced involuntary charity, which the recipients of, at least by way of observation, sometimes come to feel is a right.
3. "Buying cotton" is Southern slang for doing nothing.
4. I almost never drink coffee at the office, and never tea, but these are office staples. Likewise, a water cooler in a century plus old building makes sense. And some food, like soda crackers, or something does as well. But food that's used by one person. . .
5. Oddly, soda isn't viewed this way.
Years ago, we had a Pepsi supplied pop machine and, in going through a similar episode, the then managers determined to send it packing. Restocking it with soda was costing a fortune.
That move was detested by the staff, but not by the professionals. Why? Probably because the staff drank the soda and the professionals simply didn't.
6. If you drown your leftovers every noon with buckets of hot sauce and jalapeños, there's something wrong with them in the first place.
7. What Kipling failed to mention here is that the "free lunch" was packed was salty fare. Heavily salted ham, etc., was set out for the taking, but the one beer lunch accordingly became two or three.
As an aside, a depiction of this is given in Joe Kidd, in which the title character walks into a bar early in the movie and picks up ham, bread and cheese off an open plate.
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