Breakfast happens at home and dinner happens at home.
Lunch does not.
Lunch happens wherever you are, usually with about twenty minutes and whatever is within walking distance.
That is why lunch is the meal that ends most attempts at eating this way.
We do not think it is that good options are missing.
At one in the afternoon, hungry, with twenty minutes, you eat whatever needs no decision.
That is the whole of it.
So we settle lunch the evening before, or it does not really get settled at all.
Why the sandwich fails
The usual first attempt at a plant-based lunch is a sandwich with vegetables in it.
Bread, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and perhaps some avocado if you are feeling generous. You already know what happens next.
Two hours, at best.
Two slices of bread carry most of the calories in that sandwich and almost everything else in it is water.
By half past three you are hunting for something sweet, and you conclude that plant-based eating leaves you tired in the afternoons.
The sandwich was never the problem. The filling was!
Put a thick spread of beans or chickpeas in it and the same sandwich carries twice the energy and holds until the evening.
The three shapes that work
Almost every lunch we take out of the house is one of three things.
The first is a grain and a bean in a box. Rice with lentils, quinoa with chickpeas, buckwheat with beans, whatever vegetables are around, and a spoon of tahini over the top.
The second is a thick soup in a jar.
Lentil, bean or split pea. They reheat well and travel better than people expect.
The third is a sandwich with a real spread in it, made from whatever we happened to cook the day before.
None of these takes more than five minutes in the morning, and that is because none of them is cooked in the morning.
Cook once and carry the rest
Nothing we take out of the house was ever made for that purpose.
The lentil soup was dinner on Monday. The rice was cooked on Sunday and has been sitting in the fridge since.
The chickpea spread exists only because we had chickpeas left over.
A pot of anything takes the same time to make whether you cook two portions or six.
That is the entire system, and it costs you nothing that you were not already doing.
Cooked grains keep about three days in the fridge, cooked beans keep about the same, and soup keeps rather longer.
Venny usually bakes a few sweet potatoes whenever the oven is already on for something else, and they end up in lunches all week.
The days you prepared nothing
Some days there is nothing in the fridge and you are already out of the house.
The most reliable thing to find in almost any town is a bean or a lentil soup.
The second most reliable is a plate of rice or potatoes with vegetables.
We ask for it without the oil, and quite often they will do it. When they will not, it is still a better afternoon than a pastry.
What matters to us is that this stays the exception rather than the plan.
A system that only works during well-organised weeks is not a system at all!
And if the real damage happens later — the evening you cannot account for — it usually starts at this meal too. We wrote about that here: Why Am I So Hungry at Night? (You Might Not Be).
Breakfast is the easier meal to fix, and it is the one where a small change pays you back every single morning, so that is where we go next.
