Corby Kummer Is No Fan Of The ‘Sad Desk Lunch’

On Wednesday’s Boston Public Radio, food writer Corby Kummer derided the American lunchtime phenomena known as the “sad desk lunch,” where workers are forced to eat at the work spaces in order to save time and boost productivity.

The back-and-forth was sparked by a recent New York Times story about the salad chain Sweetgreen, whose owners are presenting the company’s sales as something of a barometer for the return to workplaces, and the renewed appetite in what the article dubbed “desk salads.”

“There’s a generic name for it that you’re forgetting,” Kummer quipped. “Sad desk lunch – it’s a whole phrase.”

Rather than bringing lunch back to your desk to send emails while shoveling quinoa, he pushed for American bosses to adopt what he called “the French model.”

“You are not allowed to work between 1:00 and 2:00,” he said. “You have to go and take your sad desk lunch to a communal table and make conversation with your workers. That’s part of the whole office serendipity, utopia, of chance encounters that lead to immense creativity that doubles the profits of the business.”

During the 20-minute discussion, Kummer also touched on a recent story about a Georgia farmworker grappling with her family’s legacy as slave-owners, and the future of tipping in a post-pandemic America.

Corby Kummer is a senior editor at The Atlantic, an award-winning food writer, and a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition and Policy.