Name: The lonely lunch.
Age: Recent, but growing.
Appearance: Très misérable.
Why are you talking French to me? Have you gone all pretentious? I am talking French to you because this is a French problem.
It is? Oui. Put simply, young French people aren’t eating lunch with their colleagues as much as they used to.
But surely lunch is the only chance they get to escape the awful people they’re trapped with all day. Not if you’re French. In France, eating solo is deeply frowned upon.
By the elderly? There is a bit of a generational divide, yes. A recent poll found that, while just 12% of French workers over the age of 49 regularly lunched alone, the number shot up to 29% for workers under 25.
Mandatory dining with colleagues sounds so … Patriarchal? That’s exactly how one 25-year-old worker in the French paper Les Echos recently described it. So she started eating alone, and was fired for failing to integrate with her team.
But I’d rather eat a sandwich at my desk and get home to my family earlier. Don’t do that either. The same article revealed that, when a different French worker tried to do this – because she had a young daughter to care for – she was accused of snubbing her colleagues.
Wow, French people must be so lonely. Oh, don’t do that.
Don’t do what? Don’t make me unfavourably compare us Brits to the French. Because we’re even worse than them. Research last year showed that 84% of UK workers always, often or sometimes eat lunch alone.
That’s because people are awful and we need a break from them. Statistics prove otherwise. Apparently 89% of us also believe that eating with people improves our mood.
Well, what a good nation of hard workers we must be to forgo that for an al desko meal deal. Now probably isn’t the time to mention that France is approximately one-sixth more productive than the UK, measured in terms of GDP per hour worked, is it?
What am I supposed to make of this? Perhaps that the UK has fallen behind when it comes to investing in capital and technology, and that a vast systemic change is required if we are to keep up with our continental neighbours?
No, that’s not it. Oh, you want a moral that’s specifically about lunches.
Yes, please. OK then: the UK would be a much better country if we all snuck out to a restaurant for an hour and a half every day to get bladdered with our mates.
That’s better. You’re welcome.
Do say: “Une table pour une personne, s’il vous plaît.”
Don’t say: “Je suis une victime tragique du capitalisme.”
