Brightness at Noon

Since I’m always thinking of what I’ll eat for lunch by 9:15 a.m., I thought I’d learn a little bit more about the noontime ritual. A Google search first brought me to the New York Public Library site where I was reminded they’re running an exhibition on “Lunch Hour NYC,” complete with a wall from the old Horn & Hardart Automat. Can’t miss that! Laura Shapiro, the culinary historian who helped with the show, says lunch is “the meal that was just made to fit into the industrial, urban workday.” I would’ve thought it had had something to do with the Angelus, as believers stopped their work at the height of the day to pray to Mary. While religious devotion has something to do with eating at this time of day (monks would eat nine hours after dawn which is where the word “noon” comes from), what we know of as lunch is decidedly a more modern affair. “Dinner” used to be eaten in the middle of the day to revive and power people working in the fields during the afternoon. As people moved away from the land into city factories, they grabbed a snack when they could and kept working. Even today, a working girl’s lucky to get a formal lunch hour. Searching for the origin of the formalized benefit, I learned that “Missouri law does not require employers to provide employees a break of any kind, including a lunch hour.” Today, I escaped the icy blasts of A/C to sit in the sun, eat a small portion of last night’s rich, satisfying Ziti with Sausage, Onion, and Fennel (thank you, Lidia!), and read more of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games . A woman across from me carefully took out several small, smooth pink stones from a gray cloth bag, laid them out in a pattern, and began to meditate. I saw in my mind’s eye the golden glow of Jean-Francois Millet’s “The Angelus” and realized we were each stopping to appreciate the wonder of being alive in our own ways.