A Free Lunch

It's hard to get a decent lunch down town for less than $10. If you order miso soup with your sushi, bank on $12. Even the cheap Chinese buffet places are getting close to a tenner for their cheapest combo. If you add a drink on to that, and the obligatory mid-afternoon chocolate bar, you're up around $16 a day.

Let's just say the additional groceries to make lunches come to $5 a day (that's just a stab in the dark, because I'm not going to get the calculator out to find out how much it costs me to make a cheese sandwich). I should save $10 a day on lunch. Which over the course of a year is roughly $2,500. That's an air fare across the world and back.

I was going to get all clever about packed lunches, but as it seems that everything else in life is leaning towards simplicity, that's where the lunches are heading too. This week I will be having a ham sandwich festival. Ham and cheese. Ham and pickle. Ham and tomato. By the end of the week I'll be as sick of ham as I was at Christmas, and will throw myself a smoked salmon and cream cheese festival for the following week.

I'm also going to make a pot of soup, freeze it in bags, and put one of those in the lunch box too. So I won't starve. And I won't be spending all evening preparing lunch.

It's just occurred to me that this proposed lunch program bears an uncanny resemblance to my yoga practice -- same thing, day in, day out. Those words would have made me cringe not long ago. Now I'm not bothered by them at all. I'm experiencing some transformation from the routine. I don't expect the lunch program will be transforming in the same way, but if it saves me the air fare from Wellington to Los Angeles and back, I'm just doing it!