When I first started working, I never used to take lunch to work. I was in my early 20’s when I realised that Lunch was a regular meal that most people ate ever

When I first started working, I never used to take lunch to work. I was in my early 20’s when I realised that Lunch was a regular meal that most people ate every day. I had genuinely grown up thinking that if you got lunch it must be because you had either, just been to church or it was a special occasion - I grew up in poverty in a community that was also generally pretty poverty stricken, so lunch just wasn’t really a thing that happened consistently. I lived around the corner from my school and mum had told my school to send me home at “lunch break” so I’d go home not really fully comprehending that this was an actual meal time. Additionally, I often did not go to school because there were a lot of days where my mum wouldn’t get out of bed and I didn’t know what day of the week it was or the time. One day though randomly she turned up at school in a super hyped up mood, with a lunch that included a really massive sandwich and some cakes and she came into my class in front of everyone to give me this lunch and made a big song and dance about it, and then she left. I remember being like, “wow something really good must have happened”. When I was a teenager a lot of the kids didn’t take lunch to school, we had a cafeteria where you could buy food at lunch break, but I was a poor loner and spent lunch break in the library doing extra-curricular science projects. It’s not necessarily wrong - but it was a significant learning point in my life when I realised my level of deprivation as a kid actually really shaped my experiences and perspectives. Even now, I’m always a bit perplexed at how I could have possibly thought that lunch wasn’t a regular thing. I mean, I did see other kids with lunch boxes and stuff but for whatever reason, this observation wasn’t really powerful enough to overcome my lived experience.