I've got three all-day meetings at work this week - so far two down and one to go. All-day meetings come in many different shapes and sizes but one thing remains constant - the buffet sandwich lunch. After a hard morning sat in some overheated conference room what you really want for lunch is a tasty snack to help you through the twilight hours of the early afternoon. But no. Lunch breaks these days are always the responsibility of some outsourced catering company, serving up so-called sandwiches and accompanying nibbles to a not-quite appreciative audience. And, quite frankly, I'm sick of it.
The first signs of impending lunchtime doom are always evident at the start of the morning when you first arrive at your meeting room. There in the corner of the room (or relegated to an unloved table just outside the door) you'll find a wobbly pile of undersize crockery and two silver flasks. One of the flasks holds an oily liquid approximating to coffee while the other holds almost-boiling water that might nearly brew a half-strength cup of extra-weak tea. It always takes a couple of attempts to work out which flask is which, and then to determine exactly which knobbly button thing will cause the unappealing liquid within to dribble slowly out. If you're particularly lucky there'll also be a plate of biscuits to share, perhaps a selection of pastry circles that look hand-made but were actually mass-produced on some godforsaken trading estate, or maybe a few regional shortbreads hermetically sealed inside impenetrable plastic wrappers. Around eleven o'clock the catering staff will then enter your meeting room to clear away the detritus of this mid-morning snack, removing any remaining biscuits so that by the time lunch arrives everybody is ravenously hungry and will eat almost anything. Almost.
Lunch, when it arrives, always consists of a few trays of sandwiches cleverly wrapped in clingfilm to give the illusion of being fresh. There'll be a tray of meat sandwiches (which means ham), a tray of fish sandwiches (which means tuna) and a tray of vegetarian sandwiches (which means egg). However no workplace sandwich is ever permitted to contain only one filling. Each must also include at least one green leaf and two additional foodstuffs chosen from a submenu of fillings that few people actually like. Expect therefore to be forced to choose from such delights as ham, brie and horseradish, or tuna, watercress and mustard, or egg, aubergine and mysterious spicy paste, along with a number of other nightmare combinations of mismatched ingredients, none of which are labelled. It's like playing Russian roulette with bread-based snacks in that you never quite know whether you've picked the single edible sandwich until you bite into it, by which time you're probably wishing you hadn't.
Accompanying the lunchtime sandwiches you can expect to find a few greasy sausage rolls and a selection of breaded items for dipping purposes, again unlabelled so that you never quite know whether you're about to bite into prawn, cheese or chicken. For added carbohydrate the caterers may also have opened a couple of jumbo sized packets of ready salted crisps and emptied the contents onto a large platter with a tiny sprig of parsley placed artistically on the top (and no doubt charged £10 for the privilege). If you're particularly fortunate there'll also be a choice of undersize fruit and own brand strawberry yoghurts to finish off your lunchtime feast. And a rumbling stomach or two.
As you can imagine I've not been thrilled by the surfeit of sandwich-based lunches I've being forced to endure this week. The worst thing hasn't actually been the food, it's been the repetition. I knew when lunch arrived yesterday that I'd be faced by exactly the same dire selection of sandwich fillings that I faced on Monday (and that I'll have to endure once again today). There are thousands of possible sandwich fillings that our contract caterering company could serve up but oh no, their profit-driven conveyor belt appears only capable of turning out exactly the same ten fillings over and over again - of which my jaded palate appreciates just the one.
It riles me that catering companies are being paid an extortionate amount per head for the privilege of serving up this uninspiring spread of bland business fare in meetings rooms across the country, particularly when half of it will end up being thrown away anyway. What a complete waste of good money (and of not-quite-so-good food). Pity me, for this lunchtime I again expect to end up picking away at three tiny 'tuna and something' sandwiches and a handful of crisps (which I could have bought from the local supermarket at a fraction of the contracted cost). I do hope that your lunch is better.
