Most of my lunches are leftovers, but many of them are things like a burger or a bratwurst that I can cook with little effort. Or I can buy something.

Imagine complaining about £4 for lunch, I'm lucky if I get out for under $20.

This person’s problem can be solved by a sandwich. Takes like 3 minutes to make, or can be prepped earlier, no cooking necessary, has color, is fresh, not frozen, beats any fast food meal in price and quality. Also can even be healthy if you shop wisely. Can be different every day. Can be hot or cold. The possibilities are endless. Sandwiches are the best.

In Brazil, if you work more that 6hs a day, the company have to give you lunch. The majority of them, give you a pre paid debit card that can be used in restaurants. This mean that they are a lot of money there that can be used in restaurants, so any office building have lots of restaurants around.

From my union contract, I get 40R daily to lunch, and the restaurant I go they serve "prato feito" (beans, rice, salad, meat) for 25, and use the rest for some icecream or to eat something with my wife at weekends.

Good Lord I am happy I can handle my shit and not have to publicly post my executive dysfunction for the planet to see.

There is another option.

Just going to put this out there, cook too much the previous night, don't eat all the dinner you cooked. Place the remainder into some form of container; transport said container to work with you the next day.

Lunch is sorted when you make your dinner!

This thread just oozes of early adults that don't understand how to spend 30 minutes preparing meals

Here in the Netherlands a lot of people just eat sandwiches. I usually take them with me to work. Not a lot of effort

It's called a sandwich.

Someone needs to raise their sandwich game.

Cooking takes SO MUCH TIME when you're single. But eating out is so expensive. It sucks.

If you're not eating a croque monsieur for lunch, that's your fault, and you deserve to be miserable

I've seriously considered buying MREs because I can't be bothered to meal prep.

I think something that is missing in the minds of the "but you could just..." posters here is that the mindset of the OP doesn't always come from laziness, immaturity, or the inability to understand how to pack a sandwich, it sometimes comes from crippling or barely functional depression.

I work from home and the thought of even making a sandwich most days in the middle of the day is just too much. I don't want to make a sandwich; I want to go back to bed for eight to ten years and I agree that lunch is the fucking worst.

(But so is breakfast, and dinner, and all of the meetings, and work, and life generally speaking, etc.)

Look I'm not saying that cooking your own lunch is a prerequisite for being an adult. However complaining about the quality of prepared food while not acknowledging you could just cook is sure as hell immature.

You can just... not? Having two larger meals a day isn't that weird.

If you want to minimize cleanup and effort, just use a rice cooker.

• Costs 30€
• Put in rice and lentils at a ratio of your chosing, cook with oil and salt
• Optionally spices and tomato paste
• Put in frozen veggies either in a steaming basket or directly in the rice
• Chuck in an onion (quartered if you're lazy) and some garlic
• Yoghurt on the side

Congratulations you now have a healthy, cheap meal you can make at home or at work. If you eat directly out of the cooker you only need to clean your spoon. No cutting board needed either.

Honestly they should just make nutrition bricks. Just combining nutrients into a brick. It could even be modular so you can add/remove various nutrients based on your nutritional needs. The perfect life would be working for the nutrition brick manufacturer and then going home to eat some nice nutrition bricks.

There's a variety of lunches that are cheap and insanely easy though:

• Stir fry with leftover rice, an egg, and some frozen veggies
• Sandwich with a piece of fruit or some veggies
• Leftover soup heated up on the stove (or in the microwave if ya nasty)
• Cold pasta dishes like pasta salad with leftover protein thrown on top
• Charcuterie plate with cold cuts, crackers, cheeses, and jams
• Salad with cold leftover proteins
• Leftover fried chicken straight out the fridge, as God intended

Like sure, some of these things rely on having leftovers laying around to dress up a bit, but I think that's a reasonable thing to expect of most people.

I just cook bigger portions for dinner and eat that as lunch

I disagree. I like cooking and since I'm working from home I can make something nice and fast at home for lunch. But I probably would have agreed back then when I worked at the office.

£4 sounds pretty cheap if it's a decent meal

Shit take.

I mostly eat leftovers from last night's dinner for lunch.

Learn how to cook. It’s not that hard to throw something together that’s good after being microwaved. The other day I made some bitter-orange chicken with rice. It was 30 minutes waiting and 4 minutes coating the chicken in the pan with the sauce.

It’s frustrating as an adult with ARFID/eating disorders. I can’t bring myself to eat leftovers because I worry that they are contaminated. I’ve thrown away so much food because I won’t reuse a pasta sauce jar if it has been opened.

A lot of the common “easy” meals are things that I absolutely will not eat - spaghetti, canned veggies, ground beef. Sometimes I struggle with eating ramen. It’s fucking embarrassing but I literally cannot help it. I will gag and puke if my brain decides I can’t eat something.

Imagine your biggest realization as an adult being a wrong opinion.