The much lamented Dutch lunch habit of drinking milk with sandwiches can sometimes be liberating too. Recently a student from Ecuador told me how much she enjoyed not being stared at while drinking milk with lunch. As a nutritionist she knows that milk is a perfect food as it “is the most complete source of nutrition available “(Dupuis 2002:25). However, in her home context milk is associated with baby food or with weak and sick people. Drinking milk with a meal as an adult is frowned upon as inappropriate behaviour.

source; dag.nl

Once, this was the case in our country too. Unfortunately little to nothing is known about the diet of ordinary people during the middle ages, but what we know of lords, knights and kings – the elite at that time –  is that there was a similar taboo on drinking milk here too. Culturally inappropriate, not least because of milk being highly perishable, people mainly drank beer. Urbanisation and industrialization were two important factors which helped milk to its current status of a healthy drink in the USA shows Melanie DuPuis in her great book ‘Nature’s perfect food’. Very much a token of the Dutch lunch culture, drinking a glass of milk is a habit which is only about 150 years old.

And as anthropologist Wiley shows, there is currently a similar relationship between urbanization and fresh milk consumption appearing in China. Growth in milk consumption is largely happening in urban areas and mainly consumed by Chinese upper classes. Milk is now commonly available as an alternative to alcoholic beverages in urban restaurants in China and is associated with a number of beneficial features such as trendy Western food styles, increased body length, healthy teeth and the prevention of ageing (Wiley 2007).

Reading about the relationships between food categories and social categories I wonder about lunch habits of myself and of this university. Is our Dutch university lunchtime habit a meal? Lunch is, like breakfast and dinner, an indication for a specific type of meal. As Mary Douglas (1972) explains; meals and drinks are social events and they put a frame on the gathering, meals usually restricts alternative occupations. Meals also have an internal structure such as the need for contrasts, like something hot and something cold, or between bland and spicy. If there is only sweet food for example, this is usually not experienced as a meal.

Food taken outside the category of a meal is usually called by its name; have a sandwich or a glass of milk. This signals the line between food as a social category (meal) and food taken for private nourishment (the food item). I am eating my sandwiches with cheese right now, because I will do sports during lunchtime. I usually feel like wanting something warm – soup –  when I go down to the canteen with my colleagues to eat my home brought sandwiches. To have our monthly chairgroup meeting during lunch feels somehow strange.

The meal category is in fact a social category. The type of meal – its internal structure and its external boundaries – says something about work relationships on a continuum of distance versus intimacy. The manifold ways to eat at work, or the lack of one clear pattern with pressure to adhere to signals the individuality of work culture and/or Dutch culture. Eating sandwiches and drinking a glass of milk for lunch hardly contains enough structuring contrasts for it to be called a meal. We even often skip lunch all together. This doesn’t really bother us, only our foreign colleagues.