buying vs. "brown bagging" your lunch

(photograph courtesy of AppleBooty)

For some of you who work by a place with cheap, healthy food, buying lunch may make the most sense. For the rest of us, food comes in one of several categories:

1) It's healthy and tasty, but is expensive (often $7+ in a city like New York City).
2) It's cheap and healthy, but the taste is pretty bad (e.g., buying boiled eggs every day).
3) It's cheap and tasty, but not healthy at all (e.g., fast food).

Do you want cheap, healthy, and tasty food? Get ready to brown bag. Now the main drawback to bringing your own lunch is that it takes time to plan your lunch and to actually make
your lunch. There are several ways to get around this:

1. Buy in bulk and prepare cooking for your whole week. We'll go more into detail on this topic in the future.


2. Pack your leftovers from dinner for lunch the next day. It saves on dishwashing and effort.


3. Buy easy to prepare, yet healthy and tasty foods. This is a whole other post itself, but just as an example, edamame is stored frozen, healthy, cheap, and tasty (addictive at that), and to make it, all you have to do is put them in the microwave for 2 minutes. No thought involved.

If you really want to commit to it, purchase a nice 'adult' lunchbox such as Mr. Bento. Besides the fact that there's a whole sub-culture bent on making nice looking lunches (search Flickr for 'bento porn'), it's great that it keeps your hot lunches hot and cold lunches cold. Mr. Bento works particularly well if you eat asian food often, but really works well for any type of cuisine.