from edible geography

Lunch: An Urban Invention

By NICOLA

Lunch may be the second meal of the day today, but it was the last of the three daily meals to rise above its snack origins to achieve that status.

As late as 1755, according to Samuel Johnson’s definition, lunch was simply “as much food as one’s hand can hold” — which, as Laura Shapiro, culinary historian and co-curator of the New York Public Library’s new Lunch Hour NYC exhibition, recently explained to me, “means that it’s still sort of a snack that you can have at any time of the day.”

And it wasn’t until later still — around 1850 — that lunch became a regular fixture between breakfast and dinner, added Rebecca Federman, the exhibition’s co-curator, Culinary Collections Librarian at the NYPL, author of Cooked Books, and a star panelist at Foodprint NYC.

Finally, by the turn of the century, “lunch was taking place between 12 and 2, more or less,” concludes Shapiro. It was a real meal at last, with a time associated with it, and particular foods and places assigned to it.

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