Food for thought

Sometimes I barely notice eating my lunch these days. If I bring a sandwich into the office with me and eat at my desk while reading or checking emails, I'm sometimes not even sure what the filling was. And I know I'm not unusual in this. Lunch has become one of the most ephemeral events in our day, in terms both of content and time. Hard then, you would think, to discuss in an exhibition.

But, the New York Public Library, to which I was lucky enough to return briefly this week, has done just that. Lunch Hour NYC is a supremely stylish and fascinating consideration of the development of lunch-time eating in this hectic city. Sections consider the development of the Automat - the quintessential New York lunch venue for decades, which combined value, quality food and attractive surroundings with high-tech serving equipment; the Power Lunch - invented by city businessmen to make the most of extended lunch-hours with networking possibilities; the Home Lunch - where soup and a sandwich developed both breadth and ubiquity across all classes of the American workforce; and Charitable meals - developed to ensure New York school children got a good square meal to fulfil their potential for the American dream.

The exhibition seems to be based on the library's extraordinary collection of restaurant menus started by Miss Frank E. Buttolph over a century ago. This allows consideration of different venues famous for certain types of New York lunch, as well as a subsidiary look at the way designs have changed over the period. These are accompanied by photographs, newspaper reports, cartoons, quotations from novels, poems, and songs, as well as advertising and government posters. A range of appropriate hardware helps to shape each section, with machines from the Automat, a retro American kitchen, and a scrubbed school table. Items like plates, trays and lunch boxes are used to make titles or chronologies interesting, and certainly gave me a sense of nostalgia. At the centre of the exhibition, a series of wagons, bicycles and handcarts consider the development of fast food from oysters to pretzels and deli sandwiches.

I came out of Lunch Hour fascinated and hungry, with the inspiration to think more carefully about my own lunch from now on, surely the most suitable outcome for an exhibition attempting to capture this fleeting but central element of our lives. It certainly gave me food for thought.