By Heidi Weaver
It’s kind of a running joke here at the law school where I work that lunchtime can be feast or famine. Some days you’re lucky if you can grab a stale granola bar or some Pirate Booty from the snack tray in our department, while other days there’s leftover pizza, In-N-Out burgers, and yellow curry coming our way from all the midday programming events that are going on. Neither of these extremes is particularly healthy, but I’m always grateful for any form of sustenance I can get since I’ve never been great at making and packing a lunch for work. Such a thing for me connotes meal planning, and meal planning is an activity I’ve just never been drawn to. In my mind, meal planning means spending all Sunday at the supermarket and then being stuck in the kitchen laboring over cookbooks and a hot stove. A lofty goal, but never a practical one when I only have minutes to spare.
These days, however, my lunch box has been getting quite a workout and it hasn’t been time consuming at all. Recently, my husband and I walked our dogs on a slightly different route, and we happened upon a front yard that was unlike any I’d ever seen before. It was completely lined with rows of shelves, and from those shelves, we spotted beautiful green lettuce heads sprouting with reckless abandon. A sign on the gate invited passersby to email the Dark Nectar Co-Op if we wanted to subscribe to a local delivery service that would bring us two pounds of vermiponically-grown lettuce from their own plot of land. The idea of belonging to a beautiful, urban, lettuce-growing farm in our neighborhood was too hard to resist so I emailed them, and now we are the happy, leafy-green eating recipients of their delicious weekly harvest. Dark Nectar Co-Op’s vision is to fill urban cityscapes “with food and beauty” and for “more than 50% of food to be grown within a city neighborhood.” That’s a goal I have time to support.
Cut back to meal planning and work lunches. Ever since subscribing to my friendly lettuce cooperative, I’ve developed a routine where after the big container of fresh lettuce arrives on my doorstep each Sunday afternoon, I wash all of it and then divvy it up into 4-5 different lunch-sized reusable containers. That way I have foundations for any kind of salads I want to throw together from produce in my refrigerator or leftovers if I want something heartier. It takes only a few minutes to prepare these lettuce foundations, and then it is very quick and easy to build portable salads from there to eat throughout the week.
Lettuce from any source would, of course, work in this scenario, and I really wish I had thought to purchase lettuce and prepare a whole week’s worth of lunch salads out of it before. In the end it took joining a lettuce cooperative to make it happen. Dividing lettuce up into containers doesn’t take much time, the salads are always super healthy and delicious, and it’s the easiest way I’ve found to make sure my work lunches are no longer left to chance.
I love this!