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The Future of Work Is Lunch

Remember a certain midday meal, the one where you build meaningful relationships with colleagues and business partners? Let’s do that again.
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Illustration: Anna Haifisch for Bloomberg Businessweek

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Remember lunch?

It was the meal that wasn’t supposed to matter anymore. Long in decline as the plastic clamshell salad colonized spare desk real estate, the weekday lunch break was an immediate casualty of the shift to remote work at the start of the pandemic. Across office parks and downtowns the world over, the great feedlots of salaried workers sat empty: boozy clubhouses; takeout holes-in-the-wall specializing in pre-grilled panini; food trucks slinging cumin-scented chicken thighs drizzled with white sauce and atop a generous bed of rice.