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 17th
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…!!
