In 1962, Roxane Debuisson, a Parisian housewife in her thirties, was walking down the Rue de Birague, in the Marais, when one of a pair of gilded iron balls—a traditional emblem of barbers—detached from its bracket and almost conked her on the head. The salon’s proprietor, it turned out, planned to replace them with a neon sign. This was les trente glorieuses, the postwar years in which French society raced toward modernity, leaving the past in the dust of massive state-sponsored construction projects. Debuisson took the remaining orb home, thereby beginning an exceptional collection of Paris ephemera—previously commonplace objects that were disappearing before her eyes.
“The collection began out of my love for Paris and my love of the street,” Debuisson later said. For decades, she conducted a one-woman salvage operation, scooping up rating plates, bench marks, pieces of bridges, tree corsets, street signs, fountains, gallows, Métro seats, mailboxes, and some seventy thousand commercial invoices. A 1970 photograph by her friend Robert Doisneau shows her in a coat and kerchief, crouching on the pavement to examine a dilapidated bust of Molière, rescued from a bakery near the Pont Neuf.
Debuisson detailed each of her finds in files stored in beige boxes and also displayed them in her apartment, at 19 Boulevard Henri IV, creating what was perhaps Paris’s finest private museum. (She was apparently generous about showing people around, and I will always regret not having seen it.) Every room but the kitchen was stuffed with treasure. A visitor could walk through corridors hung thick with shop signs—a cobbler’s boot, a glove-maker’s hand, a six-and-a-half-foot-tall pair of scissors, two gilded snails—into the dining room, where an entire wall was given over to a set of enamel-and-glass panels from a defunct pâtisserie. After Debuisson died, in 2018, her children sold many of her artifacts at auction; one article paid tribute to her as a “Proustian personage.”
But Debuisson’s Paris collection was, to many people, only the second most interesting thing about her. In her later years, she led an equally intense double life in the realm of food. My introduction to her came one day as I was flipping through a culinary encyclopedia, “On Va Déguster Paris” (“Let’s Eat Paris”), by François-Régis Gaudry and collaborators. The book featured an illustration of Debuisson in her signature look: printed blouse, sleek gray chignon, dark glasses worn inside. Her entry, by the food writer Ezéchiel Zérah, remembered her as the “godmother of grand restaurants,” noting that for decades she dined daily at a “Michelin-starred table or a palace restaurant.”
And did she ever, setting out each morning in a navy-blue Rolls-Royce Phantom V to cruise the city, belting out the classics of la chanson française with her chauffeur, the lyrics scribbled on index cards that she would produce from her handbag. The sale of her husband’s I.T. company to I.B.M., in the nineties, permitted Debuisson to do as she pleased in meals as in memorabilia. At each fine-dining establishment, she had a favorite dish: chausson aux truffes (L’Ambroisie), bugnes (the Ritz), clafoutis et la caroline au café (the Plaza Athénée), pommes soufflées (Le Meurice), mille-feuille (Le Grand Véfour), honey ice cream and frangipane tart (Drouant). Everywhere, wines by the magnum. If Ruinart Blanc de Blancs, her preferred champagne, wasn’t available, she sent out for it, once dispatching her driver all the way to Reims. She could be demanding, but she tipped big.
One eulogy noted, “She loved every element of the French restaurant ritual: chefs, seconds, commis, pastry chefs, cheesemongers, dining room managers, cloakroom attendants, waiters, florists, bellhops, valets, whom she knew by their first and last names.” Eating this way was another form of classifying and collecting. Debuisson amassed chef friends, feasting on culinary lore and gossip alongside their creations. Toward the end of her life, she received the luminaries of the food world at her apartment, presiding in a pink bathrobe and scarf. Forty chefs showed up for her funeral, all in white toques. Food & Sens memorialized Debuisson as a “gastronomic grande dame,” but, amazingly, her epicurean career took place entirely during daylight hours. She never ate dinner, considering lunch superior.
However you rate lunch, it is probably the original meal—for much of history, procuring food and finding fuel to cook it with took so long that people were unable to eat until several hours after waking up. At the same time, the amount of physical labor early humans performed required them to consume the bulk of the day’s calories as soon as they were available. “So eating meant lunching if we take lunch to be the meal eaten in the middle of the day,” the food historian Megan Elias writes in “Lunch: A History.” As a class system emerged, the rich began to eat multiple times a day. The middle class followed, and eventually advances in lighting technology expanded the duration of daily activity, allowing for extended eating hours. By around 1850, the midday mono-meal had diversified into the three-meal system that now dominates Western culture.
Per Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, the word “lunch” likely derives from “clunch” or “clutch,” meaning “as much food as one’s hand can hold.” A lunch can be quick and convenient: tomato soup, grilled cheese, poke bowl, burrito, tuna salad, leftover pad kee mao, or office-microwaved miso salmon. Or it can serve as a redoubt of leisure and even decadence in an ever-optimizing world: the simmering Sunday ragù, the midday Martini, the vacation table laid at two o’clock and not abandoned until the heat fades. So many lunches, so little time—hot lunch, cold lunch, liquid lunch, naked lunch. Lunch is the Thanksgiving of meals, neither underwhelming nor extra luxurious, adapting easily to various contingencies and configurations. It is what you make of it, whether you’re lingering over mignardises at Le Grand Véfour or scarfing down last night’s beans.
Unlike breakfast, lunch offers variety, but, in contrast to dinner, it tolerates repetition. I can measure my life in lunches: tepid ham-on-wheat sandwiches, gently curling like fortune-telling fish and infused with a weird hint of citrus from the clementine that inevitably accompanied them in my lunchbox (ages five through eighteen, North Carolina); vinegary barbecue, hush puppies, and a ten-cent York peppermint patty from a cardboard dispenser at Merritt’s (on the odd childhood day my mom had to take me to a doctor’s appointment); bagels with turkey, Swiss, and spicy mustard (ages eighteen through twenty-two, college); lamb-and-rice plates from halal carts, the Così salad with grapes and Gorgonzola (ages twenty-two through thirty, New York); the W.F.H.-er’s wild array of refrigerator forage, often topped with an egg and always followed by a cup of tea and two squares of dark chocolate (age thirty and on). And that’s leaving out weekend lunches—back-yard barbecues, dim-sum feasts, my own lunch wedding—which lend themselves to unhurried socializing and multigenerational exchange. Everyone’s awake; no one has to drive at night. Indulge by day, then take a walk or watch a movie.
Recently, the food publication Mashed polled some thirty-four thousand people about their eating preferences. Fifty-two per cent named dinner their favorite of the “Big 3” meals. Perhaps these people enjoy spending more money on identical restaurant dishes, enduring poor digestion, and having to hire a babysitter. Perhaps one of them is King Charles, who purportedly believes that lunch is a “luxury.” Or Donald Trump, who is said to go up to sixteen hours without eating, avoiding breakfast and often shunning lunch before gorging on a dinner of two Big Macs and two Filets-O-Fish, washed down with a chocolate shake. (Meanwhile, more than forty-seven million Americans live in food-insecure households, a number sure to increase with recent cuts to SNAP benefits.) In a meal competition, I’d put my money on Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson, who reportedly eats six meals a day, several of them presumably lunches, a regimen that once had him consuming some eight hundred and twenty-one pounds of cod per year.
As though the case for lunch were not strong enough, it is the only meal that, for many months of the year, reliably allows the person eating it to simultaneously experience the pleasures of food and light. With the day stretching out ahead of you, lunch can feel less transactional and slotted in than other meals. It’s a moment out of time—the August of the day. The only meal with a plethora of dedicated receptacles? That’s lunch, muse of lunch pails, bentos, picnic baskets, dosirak, tiffins. (In keeping with the decline of midday home cooking, the Mumbai dabbawalas, who have delivered lunchboxes to Indian office workers for more than a century, recently opened a cloud kitchen.) The sweaty, surprisingly sexy meal of bustling sidewalks, office workers sprawled on the grass of city squares, and Frank O’Hara’s “laborers [who] feed their dirty / glistening torsos sandwiches / and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets / on”? Also lunch. Would anyone buy Breakfastables? (At one point, Oscar Mayer did introduce a line of morning snacks—bacon and pancake dippers, little cinnamon rolls—but they were called Lunchables Breakfast.)
Indisputably, lunch is the most public meal, with “a long history of establishing social status and cementing alliances,” Elias writes. It is the meal you are most likely to eat outside of the home, with people who are not your immediate relatives, unless you are one of the five children of the LVMH boss Bernard Arnault. Reportedly, he convenes his family once a month for an “exactly 90-minute-long lunch” in order to “drill his offspring on company strategy and manager performance.” They might consider the example of the Coney Island restaurateur Nathan Handwerker, who supposedly hired college students to hang around his hot-dog stand in white coats so that passersby would think that they were doctors on lunch break from a nearby hospital, their presence testifying to the impeccable quality of Nathan’s kosher-style franks.
Recently, I was invited to lunch at the home of a woman who does not eat lunch. “One day, I went to a business lunch, and I looked at the menu and just thought, I’m not hungry,” my host, the cook and writer Perla Servan-Schreiber, recalled. That was some fifty years ago. For decades, Servan-Schreiber and her husband, Jean-Louis, breakfasted together, worked all day, and broke at 4 P.M. for tea and cakes. Then, in 2020, Jean-Louis died of COVID. A pair of Servan-Schreiber’s younger friends, Émilien Crespo and Fany Péchiodat, came up with a ritual they call Magic Lunch: Servan-Schreiber cooks, and they invite fun guests around for the meal, of which she herself does not partake. (Péchiodat, it should be noted, also maintains an unhinged annual ritual of having her birthday dinner with someone she’s never met.)
Why lunch? “It’s almost subversive,” Crespo explained, over a plate of Servan-Schreiber’s red rice and spiced lamb meatballs. “It feels a little naughty telling people it may last until four o’clock and they have to cancel all their plans.” Servan-Schreiber said that lunch felt more “recreational” than a rushed breakfast or a formal dinner. “Plus,” she added, with a glimmer in her eye, “you’re not obliged to invite couples!”
Last fall, in London, the chef Hugh Corcoran, the publisher Frances Armstrong-Jones, and their friend Oisín Davies opened a restaurant that serves only lunch, and a lot of people in the small world of the city’s restaurant reviewing got disproportionately worked up about it. The restaurant is called the Yellow Bittern, after an eighteenth-century Irish poem about a sad bird in a “wineless place,” and includes a bookshop in the basement. It is open only on weekdays and accepts reservations by phone or, supposedly, postcard. It does not take credit cards or have a written wine list. When it’s cold out, you have to ring a doorbell to get in. This is the litany of quirks that begins every discussion of the Yellow Bittern, whose most idiosyncratic feature is actually its ability, deliberate or not, to activate a full complement of resentments, allegiances, and anxieties via bowls of soup and dollops of rice pudding served exclusively between the hours of twelve and four-thirtyish.
The Belfast-born Corcoran and the English-born Armstrong-Jones are romantic partners as well as co-proprietors, complicating the traditional man-at-the-stove/woman-in-the-front-of-the-house dynamic with a prole/posh overlay: his father was an auto mechanic; hers, the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, first Earl of Snowdon, who was once married to Princess Margaret. These biographical facts were tantalizing to the British press. That the couple managed their own P.R.—that is, they simply answered questions about their restaurant, sometimes on the fly—and dressed in old-timey woollens and brogues made them irresistible. In the Guardian, Jay Rayner wrote that Corcoran “has about him the mien of a 1930s small-town butcher who has a lovely piece of gammon put aside for you,” and poked fun at “Lady Frances’s” whispery locutions. The Yellow Bittern, he suggested, walked “a fine line” between simplicity and taking its patrons for fools.
The real drama started about two weeks in, when Corcoran, who is also a writer, took to Instagram to denounce diners who treat restaurants like “public benches,” parking themselves at a table for hours, only to “order one starter and two mains to share and a glass of tap water” for a party of four. He continued, “At the very least, order correctly, drink some wine, and justify your presence in the room.” His frustration was understandable for a small businessman (even if it demonstrated a certain obliviousness to the many reasons a person might decline alcohol—do pregnant women, or Muslims, say, merit a seat at his table?). But some people did not appreciate his attempt to impose a more languid, indulgent rhythm on the midday pause, accusing him of entitlement, whining, “giving a giant middle finger to rather a lot of London,” and running “an 18-seat piece of performance art within which diners are unsuspecting subjects of a dining diktat delivered with all the fiscal charm of Ebenezer Scrooge.”
It probably did not help that Corcoran proudly proclaimed himself a Communist, displaying a portrait of Lenin in the Yellow Bittern’s dining room and a hammer-and-sickle tattoo on his right forearm. Or that he claimed that a unionized railroad worker would “definitely be able to afford” a meal at the restaurant, while regretting that it was likely inaccessible to “Deliveroo guys on bicycles,” whom he identified as “the new lowest rank of the proletariat.” A meat pie for two costs forty pounds at the Yellow Bittern. The average lunch break in the U.K., for workers who have one, lasts thirty-three minutes. Nevertheless, Corcoran argued that he was creating a “democratic space” and even an antifascist one, free from “technology and exclusivity” and “people who pay with their watches.”
However eccentric his politics, Corcoran’s message was clear enough: he was taking a stand against the vending machine, the crumb-covered keyboard, the putrefying banana, the leaden ciabatta, the tragic hummus wrap from Pret. As the controversy spread across the Atlantic, he told the New York Times, “Is this the kind of society that we were trying to create? . . . We have to fight for lunch.”
Expressing an earnest opinion is the British equivalent of walking down a crowded street wearing a “Kick Me” sign. Commentators lined up to administer their licks, with a surprising number of them pummelling the idea of lunch itself, as though the meal were some kind of abominable kink. “What I find shocking is that four people might go out for a weekday lunch at all, let alone order main courses,” Hilary Rose wrote, in the U.K. Times. “How do you find the time, and the money? What does your boss think? I haven’t been out for a weekday restaurant lunch in decades, and even when I go out for dinner, I never have a main course.” That may qualify as a personal matter, but the middling status of lunch in the hierarchy of meals invited all manner of projection. The phrase “it’s only lunch” had never seemed more disingenuous, Jonathan Nunn observed in the magazine Vittles, writing that the Yellow Bittern was “a rich text, even before you get into the important matter of whether the food is any good.”
In March, I invited a friend—an editor, alas, not a signalman or plate layer—to join me for the two-o’clock sitting at the Yellow Bittern. Just for kicks, I had tried to make a reservation by postcard, sending a Joachim Beuckelaer painting of a head of cabbage. (Embarrassing to be so on-theme bougie foodie, but it was what I had on hand.) A few weeks went by with no reply. Figuring that the postcard had got lost, I e-mailed Armstrong-Jones to book a table. Nobody seemed to mind the technological intrusion.
When the day arrived, I buzzed. Armstrong-Jones escorted me through a yolk-colored room with an English Oak banquette along one wall and to a snug table near the kitchen. The kitchen comprised a single oven and two induction burners, underneath a large casement window that was pleasingly left open. Corcoran stood behind the counter in a billowing blouse and a burgundy sweater vest, surrounded by the day’s offerings: a hotel pan full of roasted guinea fowl; a plate of butter; a cherry-colored cast-iron pot of stew. Cooling nearby were a few loaves of speckled soda bread baked by Davies.
It was lunch, so there was sunshine, streaming into the dining room, backlighting the cursive lettering on the plate-glass windows. I felt as though I had just put on a cloche and pulled up a seat in the cafeteria of a Hopper painting. A white-haired man consulted the menu with reading glasses, attached to his neck with an ENGLAND 2015 strap. (Rugby, if I had to bet.) The table was set with a posy in a parfait glass and a pot of Colman’s mustard. I scanned the room and saw an old-school reservation book lying open on a stool, paperweighted by a cordless phone. It seemed natural in the setting, rather than stagy.
We decided to comport ourselves as Corcoran’s ideal patrons: hungry, thirsty omnivores constrained by neither watch nor wallet. We started with sherry apéritifs, per Corcoran’s suggestion. I ordered celeriac soup: a homely beige mush, equally heavy on pepper, butter, and cream and devoid of croutons or other crunch-giving garnishes. I loved it. My friend had a crab-and-watercress salad. It was quiet but spoke wittily to notions of lunch by forgoing the fruit element (apple, mango, orange) that often characterizes such dishes. No cantaloupe balls at this luncheon!
We continued with the polemical meat pie, a simple green salad, a Pinot Noir from Alsace, Irish cheeses, and a piece of chocolate tart so dense that it resembled Ultrasuede. The bill was a hundred and seventy-five pounds—about two hundred and twenty-five bucks, before Trump tanked the dollar. The food was excellent, if not revolutionary. Its aggressive plainness paradoxically reminded me of the Dolly Parton saying “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” (It takes a lot of imagination, too.) What I appreciated most was the sense of a presiding intelligence in the room, a philosophy expressed with passion if not perfect coherence. Corcoran enlivens the table with endlessly debatable ideas alongside his rabbit in mustard sauce and Scottish langoustines.
I lingered after the meal to speak with Corcoran and Armstrong-Jones. Why lunch, I wanted to know, when dinner would offer a surer route to solvency and acclaim? Corcoran answered first, doubling down on his manifesto: “We live in a society that promotes this idea of constant production—you know, if you’re not in work working, then you should be doing something to be a good worker. To just cut all that and say, ‘Actually, I’m gonna drink a bottle of wine and eat a lot of food in the middle of the day,’ right?”
Armstrong-Jones focussed on the practical benefits of lunch, which also inspired the name of a culture magazine that she publishes, Luncheon. “I had three young children when I started it,” she said. “It was about the day, instead of being about what happened the night before and you feel like you’ve missed out on everything.”
Dinner can almost feel like a domestic space: proposals, breakups. “Lunch is more convivial,” Corcoran said. “People hardly ever get in arguments,” Armstrong-Jones added. Corcoran nonetheless wanted to be clear that he was no lunch naïf. “We shouldn’t forget the dark side of lunch,” he joked, noting that Spain’s ubiquitous menú del día—several courses for a reasonable price, historically set by the government—was conceived by Franco during a period of economic hardship.
Along with sustenance, the money I spent at the Yellow Bittern had bought me time. Time away from the computer and the phone, time outside the family sphere, time to catch up with an old friend—pleasures that, like all luxuries, are difficult to source and can be even more difficult to defend, depending on one’s tolerance for self-indulgence and inequality. British class hysterics aside, the furor over the Yellow Bittern may best be understood as an exercise in the political limits of self-care, individual action, and the iconoclastic stand. Demanding that diners justify their presence in the room, the Yellow Bittern justifies their absence, for better or worse, from the world outside.
Even if lunch is not quite the anti-capitalist oasis of Corcoran’s telling, it has long been associated with the right of working people to restore themselves midway through their daily toil. “Workmen at their benches drop their tools, the stairs resound with hurrying feet, and from every exit pour jostling hordes,” the journalist Granthorpe Sudley wrote in a 1901 article titled “Luncheon for a Million.” In the 1896 Presidential election, William McKinley courted the labor vote with the promise of “A Full Dinner Pail.” (At the time, many people called the evening meal “supper,” so “dinner” in this case meant “lunch.”) In maybe the most famous image of lunch, ironworkers in flat caps and overalls pause for a break eight hundred and fifty feet above the ground on a steel beam. They are supposedly enjoying sandwiches and coffee, but the photograph was in fact a publicity stunt, intended to promote the RCA Building as it was being constructed.
Until women entered the workforce in significant numbers, lunch was also the most gender-segregated meal. Middle-class women whipped up quiche Lorraine and ambrosia salads (often with the help of Black domestic workers, who were excluded from Social Security). With their children’s lunchtime needs accounted for by the National School Lunch Act of 1946—passed after wartime physicals revealed widespread malnutrition—housewives visited department-store canteens and tea rooms like the Syracuse branch of Schrafft’s, “the daintiest luncheon spot in all the State.” Before sliced bread became widely available, women’s magazines were full of advice “on social distinctions and the thickness of bread in sandwiches,” according to the food historian Laura Shapiro. The trick to getting the bread thin enough for distinguished company was to butter the face of the loaf first, slicing as close to the spread as possible. Peanut butter, meanwhile, was introduced as “a high-end spread” popular at ladies’ luncheons, intended to be mixed with enlivening elements, such as celery or nasturtiums.
Recently, when I visited New York, people were lining up for patty melts and cherry-lime rickeys at S & P Lunch, in Flatiron. (It began as S & P Sandwich Shop in 1928, but was known as Eisenberg’s between the late fifties and 2021, after which it was revamped by new owners.) As a public institution, the lunch counter, devoid of tricky reservations and élite tables, represents a certain idea of equality. It is no coincidence that, in 1960, four Black students at North Carolina A&T chose to challenge racial discrimination at a whites-only lunch counter, taking a stand by sitting down on stools below a placard advertising fifteen-cent lemon-meringue pie. The protest and the images that it produced were the picture of American democracy, galvanizing public opinion and accelerating the movement: an unbroken line of citizens seeking simple fare in side-by-side solidarity.
Nearly a decade later, Betty Friedan turned to the symbolic power of lunch in service of equal rights for women, when she and fifteen fellow-protesters installed themselves around a table at the male-only Oak Room in Manhattan. Unable to remove the women, waiters removed the table itself, but the point was made: within months, the decades-old policy of banning women between noon and three was rescinded.
Social justice has not tended to feature on the menu of executive-class lunches, but they, too, are social exhibitions, of both a bombastic commitment to work and the power it has bequeathed. Bricklayers and ironworkers, Sudley noted in 1901, did not “gobble or bolt their food” as Wall Street bankers were wont to do, “sail[ing] through the doorway with streaming coat tails” to snatch up “a sandwich, a fishball, [a] pie” at the nearest restaurant, or sending out for meals from “a white aproned waiter hurrying along with the hastening stream and bearing jealously a tray laden with steaming dishes.” (Messenger boys, for their part, lined up at carts for sausages with a dollop of sauerkraut: “Hey, boss, gimme a dog!”) To place an order with this early version of Seamless or DoorDash was to show that you were busy. The spectacle of the executive lunch reached its apotheosis in Hollywood, at the M-G-M cafeteria, where, Elias writes, three thirty-foot tables were equipped with telephones transmitting urgent messages from on set.
Renunciation, for the executive luncher, is its own form of ostentation. If the power move at a power lunch is ordering off menu (as Cary Grant was known to do at 21, demanding peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches), the most powerful form of power lunching is forgoing the meal altogether (“Lunch is for wimps,” Gordon Gekko declared in “Wall Street”). The publisher Michael Korda once praised the expense-account lunch as “an essential tool of the trade, like a carpenter’s adze.” Yet his colleague Robert Gottlieb found the expectation of daily excess so oppressive that he proposed a moratorium, urging his peers to redirect their lunch money to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The three-Martini lunch was barely holding on in 2003, when the GQ editor Art Cooper suffered a stroke while lunching at the Four Seasons, but it has since evolved to suit contemporary tastes. In a recent issue dedicated to rediscovering “the most inessential and glorious part of the working day” (i.e., lunch), the FT Weekend Magazine visited a London brasserie that offers a special, lunch-appropriate “two-sips Martini.”
Still, the power lunch endures, retreating in periods of economic and moral penny-pinching only to reëmerge when the belts and inhibitions of the ruling class undergo their periodic loosening. Thus, the Robb Report recently declared that “power lunch is back,” and the New York Post reports that “midtown staples like Michael’s and Fresco by Scotto” are “swarming with the city’s movers and shakers.” A look in at the Grill, in the Seagram Building, confirmed that plenty of people are still willing to pay handsomely to wheel and deal among the ghosts of Vernon Jordan and Barbara Walters. “We’re very cognizant of the scalability of a pure model,” someone was actually heard saying. The cheeseburger was as tall and round as a melon. Martinis—a nostalgia order now—arrived with great pomp, poured high until the tinkly end, as though the “Pissing Boy” statue had inspired a midtown cocktail. “We’ll send you the deck,” a man in a blue shirt said, scurrying back to the office after a meal slightly longer and a lot more expensive but not much more fundamentally decadent than one at a Chipotle.
The middle meal, in fact and in spirit, is a bridge, a connector. “Because it offers such rich opportunities for the performance of culture, lunch is a meal in perpetual transition, so that any account of what is commonly eaten in one place or time is likely to change within a generation,” Elias writes. Psychologists and educators tell us that a distinguishing feature of our era is loneliness. According to a 2023 advisory by the Surgeon General, America is in the throes of an “epidemic of loneliness,” with roughly half of adults reporting feelings of isolation, which can increase the risk of premature death as much as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Young people, alienated by the pandemic and social media, are turning to religion as a source of connection. God is great, but sometimes fellowship—a certain kind of existing in social space—can be as simple as a tuna sandwich. Plus, you get a pickle. ♦
