People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day
When my daughter was born during the recession, my wife and I went through a stretch where money was pretty tight. One obvious expense to cut was eating out for lunch every weekday. So I switched to bringing in lunch.For several months, I brought the same thing: granola, yogurt, and chopped melon. I love food and love variety, so I was really surprised to discover that I simply didn't get tired of it or resentful. Every day, I looked forward to having it.Every now and then I would have a bowl of canned soup instead, but that was literally the only variety I had. Like others in the article, I found the peacefulness and simplicity of not having to stress out about where to go for lunch more than made up for the monotony. In fact, knowing all day what I was going to have for lunch led to a greater anticipation of it.I think this worked for me because I was only doing this for lunch and not for every meal of the day. So this actually increased the meta-variety of my eating: dinner meals were varied and lunch meals were not. So I got to experience both repetition and novelty.It was a really interesting experience that I'd encourage others to try. In general, I think repetition and ritual tends to be undervalued in Western culture, but has always been an important part of the human experience.