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The classic lunch break is no longer what it was with a change in office culture, cafe closures and price increases eating into the precious midday break.
Would you call fried chicken and chips at 10am 'lunch'?
"I try and keep as regular a schedule as I can, but that will translate a bit weirdly when I'm on shift work," says reporter Finn Blackwell, who's often found in RNZ's break room well before noon, feasting on anything from a pastry to chicken and chips.
"I might be having my lunch on an early shift at 10 in the morning, or I might be having my lunch on a late shift at 6pm, and that can raise some odd looks."
Today on The Detail, we look at how lunch culture has changed, and why a good lunch is less about what and when you eat, than how you eat it.
Sophie Gray, a chef and food writer who runs a website called Destitute Gourmet, which is dedicated to helping people eat well on a budget, says much of the importance of a lunch break is the break - but for many, that has got harder.
"It's really important in terms of workplace culture," she says.
"I think in the last few years as the work from home or hybrid working has really become the norm, it's been much harder for workplaces to create a workplace culture and interaction ... having a break is really important."
Gray encourages people who work in an office with a break room to use it.
"There's interactions that happen, there's conversations that happen around that space that isn't necessarily about work, it's about your life," she says.
"There is a sense that you engage with people over what they've brought for lunch... people engage over food in ways that they simply don't over other things."
But the desk lunch has become the norm for many. Jesse Mulligan, who hosts RNZ's Afternoons show, eats at his desk, a sandwich in one hand, editing audio with the other.
That isn't a reflection of how he feels about the meal though - he keeps a salt shaker and a bottle of chili oil on his desk, just in case he has a bland lunch that needs some help.
"I'm obsessed with lunch. From the moment I get to work in the morning all I do is think about lunch and look at the clock to decide when I can eat it, and I don't know if this is normal or not but I asked my co-workers the other day, 'is it normal that at the end of my lunch, at the last mouthful, I feel a little bit sad that it's over for the day?'" he says.
Mulligan also has guidelines on the appropriate time to eat lunch.
"I don't think you can eat lunch before 11.45am, but anytime that big hand starts approaching the top of the clock I think you're in," he says.
"But it does feel like a personal failure if I don't make it right through til noon."
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