Eat to work?

Lunch is a fascinating subject. My friends, who know me well now, make it a point to find out what I plan to eat, almost at the moment I walk into the office some hours earlier. Well, perhaps more accurately when they walk in some time after I do. And I have it all planned, too. After doing most of the cooking at home and playing all weekend with ingredients in my refrigerator and spices in my larder, for me, simplicity rules during the working day. So, as much as I would love to dive into cheese filled blinis with tomato coulis (it tastes amazingly like uttapa with tomato chutney, I assure you!) and smoked salmon with tiny capers and sliced pickled onions, eaten with a nice crème fraiche, I know that it is probably easier to chomp through a cheese sandwich with some sharp mustard slathering it for that gourmet touch. Or even a dish of dahi with a chip or two for company. Or some upma, redolent with jeera and ghee and colourfully dotted with peas and a carrot or three…

But that is all again lunch from home, stuff that I probably have made myself, to my own gustatory specifications. The alternatives, once I have commuted into mid-town, where my office is? Quite a few, really. My first choice when I initially found myself too busy and too nervous to explore an area that was previously unknown to me was to continue with my self-created diet. Then, having run out of ideas that are even remotely edible, and out of reach of the bakeries that bake the kind of bread that I mandate for sandwiches, I resorted to ordering up a lunch service. It was all about health food, organic, vegetarian, high fibre, slow salt, no chillies and, after a point, very boring. But all that chewing was great for my incipient double chin, which was starting to make me worry. A rather uncertain and hectic schedule involving more days out of the office than in it, brought that lunch routine to a tapering halt, and I had to think again, harder this time.

While I thought, I lived on odd combinations of leftovers from home, some that worked, some that made me feel like I was scavenging from a bad restaurant, or was eating a Bengali meal consisting of a vast range of tiny, totally unrelated courses. To break that habit, I occasionally ate in the office canteen, which dished up a cuisine that was even more mismatched and often truly inedible. Also a lot spicier than my rather wimpy system was used to, which meant that it burned like heck going in and did the same during its exit as well, indelicate as that may sound. So I ate many plates of half-cooked rice and watery yoghurt, given some semblance of taste with a little speck of mixed pickle or salad, a euphemism for a semi-macerated melange of carrots, cucumber, tomato and generous servings of onions. It may not have been terribly healthy, but it did change my fashion statement – I went around at least twice a week wearing an impromptu yashmak to shield whoever I was talking to from the fumes that even the strongest chewing gum could not hide.

And, then, of course, there was the order-out option. From sandwiches (which I make better) to salads (ditto), biryanis and parathas, pastas, pizzas and kebabs, the gamut of foods rich in calories, salt, spices and, I must admit, flavour, could be found, if you could convince the delivery man from the relevant restaurant that you did, indeed, exist at the address you were giving him. And the fallout – a whole lot of money spent and a whole lot of weight gained, with an occasional tummy bug thrown in just for fun. Having gone through every possible permutation of food I can find for lunches at work, I am now back to the healthiest, easiest and least bothersome of all routines – lunch packed at home, trucked in to work and eaten with familiar fondness if not great relish as I work on writing my way through the week.

There has to be another route I can take to fill my nicely rounded tummy with food that it likes. Any ideas?