I didn’t get to eat lunch today. There was a lunchtime meeting that they neglected to tell me I was supposed to attend until the last minute, and there wasn’t any food provided. So naturally my thoughts all afternoon turned to the subject of lunch, and what a good thing it is. Here’s some lunch things to be grateful about:

You can eat a big lunch and it won’t keep you up all night the way a big dinner does. Or at least, a big dinner keeps me up all night. You may be impervious to the perils of a big dinner. Or young, which amounts to the same thing.

Lunch time at work is usually my “me” time. I get something to eat and I sit downstairs in our enormous break room with a concrete floor that’s painted in big swirls of gold glitter for reasons that remain obscure and read an electronic book while I eat and just ignore the rest of the world.

There’s a lot of good restaurants near my office, because it’s in downtown Decatur. There’s the Brick Store Pub, Andryannis Greek Bistro, Victory Sandwich, and lots more. There’s also Souper Jenny’s right across the street, which is just the place to go if you want a seven-dollar bowl of soup and a roll served cafeteria style. But as often as not, I just buy something in the aforementioned break room, which is named “the Breakaway Café” despite the fact that no one serves coffee there, and there isn’t even a kitchen. What there is, is a counter where two catering vendors alternate days serving a limited menu of buffet foods.

The Monday-Wednesday caterer serves modern southern fare, so I often get chicken wings and two vegetables (usually collards and green beans). You can tell it’s southern fare because the vegetables include macaroni and cheese, potato salad, and a broccoli rice casserole that consists of rice and melted cheese with a small scattering of green bits in it.

The Tuesday-Thursday caterer serves wraps that are partly pre-made, then finished off on order and toasted on an industrial-grade George Forman grill. My particular favorite is something I believe is called a Chicken Seizure wrap, although I’ve been eating those things for months and haven’t even felt a twitch. They also do a cheeseburger wrap, which allows you to feel you’re being healthy by having a wrap, but it’s filled with ground beef, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard, so it also tastes really good. Plus there’s chips.