How a Lunch Swap Can Change Your Life

Every day for the past 16 years, the employees at Gustiamo, a gourmet Italian foods importer, have rolled their office chairs over to a table in the middle of their warehouse in New York City’s South Bronx to eat a shared lunch together. The table is always set with real plates and silverware, with a glass of water at every setting. Everyone in the office (usually six or seven people) brings something to contribute—a bowl of pasta, a loaf of bread, a barley salad, all of which gets passed from person to person.

“Whenever we cook for ourselves, for our families, or if we have friends over, we make extra. And then we bring the leftovers to the office for lunch,” says Gustiamo's Beatrice Ughi. “We encourage even the newest employees to try—if they have a stove at home, they can put up some water, take garlic, and make a tomato sauce.”

Although there are few office spaces set up to accommodate formal, sit-down meals (let alone one also stocked with high-quality olive oil and marinated artichokes), many people regularly share—or swap—lunches with coworkers. Buying lunch every day can be expensive, and making it daily can get overwhelming. Plus, it’s so easy to fall into a lunch rut (who hasn’t eaten the same turkey sandwich every day for a week?). Lunch swaps can be a way to keep the meal interesting while splitting up the work and the cost.

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Even food pros can struggle with the daily challenge of making and packing food to bring to the office. When the Epi team decided to bring homemade lunch every day this week, four of my colleagues (three of whom work in our test kitchen) decided to join forces. Every day from Tuesday through Friday, one of them cooked lunch for the group.

“I usually don’t bring my lunch, because it’s hard enough for me just to make dinner every night,” says Epi food director Rhoda Boone, who has an infant son at home. “So the idea of bringing five lunches this week was somewhat overwhelming.” She was also excited for the surprise of seeing what her fellow swappers cooked each day.

For Grace Landrieu, who works at an education non-profit in New York, the appeal of the lunch swap was the promise of variety. “I’m single and have a hard time making groceries last, and I don’t want to eat the same thing every day,” she says. It turned out that many of her coworkers felt the same—too many, in fact, for just one swapping group—so Landrieu set up several different lunch teams, each with a specific theme (i.e. vegetarian, meat eaters, and casual lunch—more on that last one later).

Although making lunch for three or four people is more time-consuming than, say, running to the deli for a bagel and cream cheese, a lunch swap can actually be a big time-saver over all. Atlanta-based Charlsie Niemiec, who works in healthcare marketing, recently set up an office soup swap (held on Super Tuesday, natch). “The intention was to make lunch a little bit easier on our team—especially on the days when we're just too busy to leave the office and grab lunch,” she says. Eight people participated, bringing in dishes that included Brunswick stew, kale–sweet potato soup, and white bean and turkey chili. “Across the board everything was delicious,” Niemiec says. The best part? She didn’t have to cook lunch again for over a week.

Brunswick Stew

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Another potential benefit of a lunch swap (or share) is that it can shake up your routine a bit. When she worked as the national editor at Curbed a few years ago, Sarah Firshein (who happens to be married to Epi’s Executive Director, Eric Gillin) participated in a shared lunch with two coworkers for several months. “It was a fantastic job, but I worked my ass off, and I felt like my lunch strategy was ordering from Just Salad down the street because it was all about efficiency,” she remembers. Sitting down to a shared lunch of home-cooked food with her colleagues was a welcome pause. “We would bring all the individual dishes that we’d prepared and have a proper lunch together, just enjoying each other’s company at the table,” Firshein says. “It was just nice to take that time out of our day.”

That’s the thing about feeding people, even people with whom you have a more formal relationship: it’s a kind of bonding. “You end up cooking for people you don’t normally eat lunch with or talk to, so it’s a good way to get to know new people,” Landrieu says.

Niemiec agrees. During the office soup swap, she notes, several people who don’t work together on a regular basis participated. “It was neat to see everyone bonding over soup and having that lunch time carved aside to hang out and talk.”

There are a number of ways you can structure your lunch swap; the important thing is to make sure you set it up in whichever way works best for you and your coworkers. Some people prefer a more laid-back approach. “We almost never told each other what we were going to make in advance,” says Jamie Miles Cunha, a San Francisco–based physical therapist who participated in a weekly lunch share with two coworkers at her former office. That occasionally led to similar dishes, but nobody seemed to care.

For others, like Firshein and her former coworkers, half the fun of the swap is in the planning. ‘We would send a massive, back-and-forth, crazy planning email chain,” she remembers. “Eight emails later we’d figure out a day and a theme.” (Themes included: afternoon tea, dishes that mean something to you, and a group cheese plate, which Firshein served on an actual slate that she brought to work for that express purpose.)

Some people prefer a shared meal. At the Gustiamo office, the food is secondary to the communal experience. “We share food, stories,” says Ughi. “We learned today that one of our new employees is a poet.”

For others, part of the appeal of a swap is getting a break from daily cooking duties, in which case it makes more sense to assign each group member a day of the week on which they’re responsible for providing lunch. “If you’re going to make one lunch it’s just as easy to make four,” says my Epi coworker Anna Stockwell. For her group meal, she made a kale salad with shredded carrots, crumbled feta, and avocado. She served it with slices of apple and prosciutto. It took her all of 10 minutes to put the lunch together.

Simplicity, it seems, might be key to longterm lunch swap maintenance. At Landrieu’s office, she explains, people started making very elaborate meals: empanadas, homemade manicotti, chicken-andouille gumbo. And that started to intimidate some fellow swappers. “If someone made a really perfect meal, then everybody else felt like they had to do something perfect,” Landrieu says. The solution they found was to start a group just for swappers who wanted to keep lunch casual, with things like simple sandwiches or soups.

Gripes of the Work-Day Lunchtime Set

My Epi coworkers also stress the importance of swapping foods with coworkers who have similar tastes. For their meals—which, in addition to Anna’s kale salad, included a coconut red lentil curry with peas and butternut squash and twice-baked sweet potatoes—the Epi Lunch Swap Team aimed for gluten-free, veg-friendly, healthy but delicious dishes.

Interestingly, although my coworkers didn’t intend to eat their swapped lunches together, it happened naturally a couple of times over the course of the week. There’s something about sharing food that kind of makes you want to be around other people, instead of hunched over at your desk getting spaghetti sauce stains on your keyboard.

“We love it,” says Ughi of Gustiamo’s daily lunch ritual. During the rest of the workday, she says, they’re often so busy, they don’t have any time to talk. But together at the table, over a bowl of imported pasta dressed with Sicilian pesto or even just a few slices of leftover pizza, they can talk through work problems—or just talk in general. “Today we were talking about physical inventory, a few cases of pasta missing,” she says. “And also the poetry from the new guy.”