Cubicle dwellers of the world, stop scarfing salad over your keyboards already!
It’s gross, depressing — and believe it or not, an epidemic.
The American Dietetic Association found that 75 percent of office workers eat lunch at their desks as many as two to three times a week, and for New Yorkers, a skipped midday meal is practically expected. That’s why Tony Schwartz, author of “The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working,” started the new Take Back Your Lunch movement this summer to inspire workaholics to actually — gasp — reclaim their lunch hours away from their desks.
So far, more than 1,000 people have signed up on takebackyourlunch.com, vowing to spend their lunch hour away from their computers. Using Facebook, Twitter, Meetup and Foursquare, the movement is inspiring people to become “chief lunch officers” at their companies, encouraging co-workers to actually spend time eating outside.
WHERE BEST TO TAKE BACK YOUR LUNCH?
“We don’t understand how to let go anymore,” Schwartz, 58, explains of the near-extinct lunch hour.
“I just worked with a president [of a firm] and I said, ‘Tell me about your day.’ He said, ‘Well, I get in about 7:30 a.m., and I work until about 6:30, mostly meetings, and then I do my e-mail. I leave about 9.’ I said, ‘What do you do for lunch?’ And he laughed, ‘Oh, I never have lunch.’ ”
The problem is so deeply ingrained in New York as to almost be absurd, says one Manhattanite who’s taken a leadership role in the movement.
“We’re the epitome of the rat race,” says Joanna Peña-Bickley, 36, who works as creative director at the Wunderman ad agency on Madison Avenue.
“The only way to keep your job in 2009 was to prove that you were the most dedicated employee who was willing to work 24/7, that there were no boundaries. For me, Take Back Your Lunch is an opportunity for a little bit of an inspiration. Because you’re not going to find inspiration at your desk.”
Of course, Peña-Bickley first heard about the lunching campaign while she was eating lunch at her desk.
“It was that a-ha moment of, ‘What is wrong with me? Oh my God, that’s me.’ That’s when I realized, it’s everybody,” she says.
Or as another worker who’s taken back her lunch says, it’s all in the way you see the meal.
“Our relationship to lunch is a bit like a chore that has to be accomplished, like doing laundry,” says 40-year-old Lisa Schneider of Valley Stream, LI, who works in marketing and product development. “You don’t savor doing laundry. You just throw it in and move on.”
She found that eating outside made her feel more refreshed.
New York psychiatrist Marianne Gillow explains the problem in medical terms: “Wolfing down highly processed convenience foods can trigger erratic spikes in your blood-sugar levels, leaving you vulnerable to late-afternoon irritability and ‘brain fog.’ ”
Nutritionist Sophie Pachella of eatstrong.com, says, “Ten minutes outside will give you a far more significant energy boost than a bag of chips.”
That’s what business analyst Brenden Hussey discovered when he grabbed a burger outside in Madison Square Park during one of the Take Back Your Lunch-organized meet-ups. Despite what Gordon Gekko says in “Wall Street” that “lunch is for wimps,” Hussey, 41, counters, “I don’t think there are a lot of people on their deathbeds who wish they would have eaten more lunches at their desk.”
After three years of billing 2,300 hours per year with the same group of lawyers, Stamford, Conn., attorney Frances Slusarz, 39, observes, “I am so bad that the deli downstairs in my office building doesn’t even have to ask for my order. It is the same every day. I grab it, go back to my desk, close the door, and listen to my iPod for 10 minutes while surfing the Web for craft projects I will never have the time to do.”
Taking her lunch has helped her get away from the mindset, she says, that so many lawyers have of seeing life in six-minute intervals — because clients are billed for each tenth of an hour. “I discovered,” she says, “there is a bright yellow thing in the sky sometimes.”
mstadtmiller@nypost.com
Give this lunch note to your boss!*
Dear Boss:
It’s not how many hours I work that makes a difference. It’s how much value I generate. And if I go out to lunch, I’m going to be much more productive when I get back in the afternoon. I’ll get more done and at a better level of quality in less time.
Sincerely,
Your Devoted Employee
P.S. You should take your lunch, too.
* And if your boss has a problem with it, tell him or her Tony Schwartz, the founder of the Take Back Your Lunch movement, sent you!