CISS Affiliate Megan Elias Says Remote Work Has Clobbered Restaurant Lunches While Promoting Home Meals
The line at the workplace lunch haunt isn’t as long as it used to be. Last year, spending nationally for weekday restaurant lunches fell 3.3 percent from the pre-pandemic year of 2019, according to the business tech platform Square. Boston logged three times that percentage drop, as people shifted their eating out to weekends instead.
But while restaurant rushes slackened, remote work has spurred DIY lunches at home, says Megan Elias, associate professor of the practice and director of the Gastronomy Program at Metropolitan College and CISS Affiliate, whose books include Lunch: A History. Making the midday meal—and making time to eat it—marks a reclamation of the lunch break, a source of employer-employee tension since the dawn of industrialization, Elias says.
To read more, visit BU Today, where this article originally appeared on January 10, 2025.