Lunchtime art in Switzerland

May 24, 2011, 4 Comments

Lunch boxes as art. These days anything is possible but this photo is real, and it says so much about Swiss life. Or at least daily life in Bern or almost any town in the German-speaking part. I took it at about five past one, after the main lunchtime rush. At that time in Britain most people are just sitting down to eat, not heading back to work. In Switzerland lunch begins at 12 noon. As the church bells strike 12, most of the country stops. Offices close, as do shops and banks outside the city centres, children leave school, building sites fall silent, almost everything grinds to a halt, except public transport. Go into a Swiss restaurant at 12.15 and you’ll think you’ve won the lottery if you get a table; go in at 1.45, and it’ll be empty but then so will the kitchen.

Not everyone wants, or can afford, to eat out in a restaurant every day but it always surprises me how many Swiss still want something approaching a real meal at lunchtime. No quick sandwich at the desk. I think it’s a hangover from not having had school lunches. Most Swiss schoolchildren have to go home for lunch, which creates havoc for working mothers; then again, perhaps it’s a way to make sure Swiss women stay at home and in the kitchen. I know some men who still go home for lunch, knowing that it will be on the table waiting for them. Sandwiches do exist, of course, but you don’t see many sandwich bars like the ones that inhabit almost every street in London. There are now eight branches of Subway in Switzerland and the supermarkets recently expanded their selection of sandwiches to about ten types, but it’s all a long way from the massed ranks you see in Britain. So takeaway meals, such as pasta or Thai curry, are very popular and they all seem to be served in those white polystyrene boxes.

What I love most is that the cartons are so neatly stacked. The bins were too full but almost none of the workers wanted to leave their rubbish on the ground, so an impromptu piece of street art started to form. I sat there waiting to see how high it would grow, but of course it didn’t last long. Within five minutes the bin men came and took it all away. They know that the best time to empty the bins is around quarter past one. Any earlier and they would miss most of the rubbish; any later and there would be piles lying around half the afternoon. And that wouldn’t be acceptable to anyone, so they are as punctual as the people eating lunch.

Lunchtime in Bern: Swiss life in a snapshot.