Do you make time for Nuncheon?

Now, as well all know … lunch is that most welcome break in the middle of the working week or that weekend treat, closely followed by that well-earned snooze!

But did you know that Luncheon is a relative newcomer in the daily round of meals, only emerging in the late 17^th century.

The word itself is a bit of a mystery and is probably a collision between two different things:

• Lunch – a northern dialect word for a hunk of bread or cheese and …
• Nuncheon – a midday snack, from Old English none, “noon” plus schench, “drink”

In the Middle Ages there were only two significant meals: dinner, eaten at noon, and supper, eaten in the late afternoon. This made practical sense: the middle of the day was when people needed an energy boost, and eating in the dark required expensive artificial lighting.

But over the centuries, patterns of work and social fashion pushed dinner time further and further back into the day. By the mid-18th century, most households ate dinner at 5pm; by the mid-19th century, it was 8 or 9pm. This created the space for new meals earlier in the day: tea (first recorded in 1739) and luncheon (1652), first shortened to “lunch” in 1829.

Making the most of a Productive lunch

Lunchtime is renowned as a brilliant way of putting together business deals or even schmoozing clients!

A great advert for the importance of the institution of lunch took place in 1914, when the celebrated Belarus-born chemist Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) was entertained by CP Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian.

When Scott asked what he was working on, Weizmann replied that he had just perfected a new technique for safely synthesising acetone, a highly explosive substance used in cleaning products and explosives.

 A week later, Scott was lunching with the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who complained that the war effort was foundering for a want of acetone. The rest is, literally, history. The British munitions industry out produced the Germans and the war was won. When asked what he wanted as a reward, Weizmann – a lifelong Zionist — asked for a Jewish state. He got one, largely as a result of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and became the first president of Israel in 1949 …. And all because of lunch…!!