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So there we are, under the ‘Your mother doesn’t work here’ sign, in the cafeteria’s infernal din, overflowing with food wrappers, where someone has once again forgotten a lunchbox that has turned a gray-green fuzz in the communal fridge. Lunchboxes are unpacked and, even though they look alike, they are infinitely private, almost intimate.
Food is identity, and when we eat lunch at work in Denmark, there’s no getting around the homemade lunchbox as the crucial common denominator. Often something to get over with as fast as possible — we need to get back to the computer; a large share of us even eat lunch at the computer — we optimize, we’d like to leave early.
