Lunch
June 25, 2012 11:46 PM   Subscribe

The New York Public Library's exhibit on lunch, profiled in a recent Edible Geography interview.
posted by latkes (8 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
I hate having lunch at the library. Three weeks later they expect it back.
posted by twoleftfeet at 12:09 AM on June 26, 2012 [1 favorite]


Thank you for a new favorite blog!
posted by jfwlucy at 12:41 AM on June 26, 2012


They do have an exhibit for the Automat.

These kids today don't remember the Automat, so let me try to explain. You walked into the Automat, and they had row upon row of window boxes. In each box, there was a tasty foot item, recently prepared. You inserted your coins into the slot next the box, and the little door would open, and you could take out your steak or your potatoes or your pie. You would walk along, looking at the boxes, and make your decision about what you wanted to eat. Then you would pump coins into a few boxes, take your food, and eat it at a nearby table.

And the food was delicious! It really was.

The only way I can convey the concept to these kids today is to have them imagine a vending machine with hundreds of choices, all prepared by little elves who live inside the vending machine. It was like that.
posted by twoleftfeet at 12:53 AM on June 26, 2012


Fascinating.

A nickel, however, could not keep up with rising costs. In 1950 the company lost 2 million dollars on its New York coffee sales, even though it had been trying to save money for several years by watering the brew and mixing milk into the cream. If the company could have charged 7 or 8 cents per cup, the costs would have been covered, but the coin slots took only nickels and quarters. On November 29, 1950, the price jumped to 10 cents, and the public was furious. Coffee sales plunged from 70 to 45 million cups per year.

"Plunged" is not the right word for reducing sales by 36% while raising prices by 100%. It's a turnaround from a loss of $2 million to a profit of $1 million.

During the 1920s peanut butter became increasingly popular for children’s lunches, often mixed with cream, evaporated milk, chili sauce, or other thick liquids that made it easier to spread. When hydrogenated peanut butter became widely available a decade later, most of those combinations faded away, though the much-loved peanut butter and chili sauce sandwich held on through World War II.

That sounds disgusting. But the real reason I picked it out is that I bet by 2020 peanut butter will be almost extinct. You already can't bring it to many schools and it isn't a dinner food. That leaves breakfast toast.

Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Alexander Woollcott, were already known for their sharp opinions when the lunches at the Algonquin began; others polished their style right there at what came to be known as the Round Table. But not until one of their number, Harold Ross, founded The New Yorker in 1925 did they find a natural home for the sort of writing they did best. The unforgiving wit, urbane sense of irony, and perfect phrasing that characterized what Ross heard around the Algonquin table were precisely what he hoped to capture in his new magazine.

Hipsters!
posted by DU at 5:14 AM on June 26, 2012


The clamor and chaos of lunch hour in New York has been a defining feature of the city for some 150 years.

What an excellent, simple idea for an exhibit. Despite the endless, see-and-be-seen power restaurants and celebrity chef mania, lunch really is New York's meal. Many happy memories (and I'm old enough to have had a sandwich and chocolate milk or two from the Automat).

What I'm surprised is missing is some mention of the generic NY coffee shop - the kind that has become a little harder to find in recent years. The formica table, red-plastic-cup, napkin-dispenser, laminated-menu place that did an excellent tuna salad on toast, "happy waitress" or salami on rye with a pickle spear. And if it needed an icon, there's Seinfeld, which basically depicted a single coffee-shop lunch that went on for about a decade.

Some folks here will be the kind who want to contribute to the Collaborative Menu Transcription Project.

Great post!
posted by Miko at 5:39 AM on June 26, 2012


After claiming erroneously that there were no more automats in NYC, I was thankfully proven incorrect.

Bamn Food is not only an automat, has interesting looking dishes, and is on my way home... it has mac'n'cheese croquettes.
posted by abulafa at 11:00 AM on June 26, 2012


Apparently Bamn! is closed. According to the FB page, it might reopen soon.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 12:46 PM on June 26, 2012


Ha I just tried to post this, not being able to return home for the big mid-day meal was fascinating - I remember a plot point in some old book where a man casually mentions to his parents that he was eating dinner as late at 5pm somedays and they reacted as if he just admitted he shoots heroin into eyeballs hourly.
posted by The Whelk at 11:57 AM on July 1, 2012


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