Lunch On tends to spotlight the person who prepares the food, even if it's not the leader of a business. This is also unusual compared to the United States, where we worship celebrity chefs, but ignore the people who prepare our food on a day-to-day basis. Lunch On treats everyone like a celebrity chef, breathlessly following someone around, like the older woman who cooks at a taxi depot, preparing traditional Japanese meals as taught to her by her mother-in-law.

Not all the lunches come from cafeterias, though. There's also a bento component to many of the episodes. Bentos are boxed lunches, either made at home or purchased, and very common in Japan. They are also seen here in the United States, where there exists a bento subculture. As with the canteen chefs, Lunch On often spotlights the people who prepare the bentos. Exasperatingly, this is often the woman of the house—either a mother or a wife. There's also an expectation that women will prepare their own bentos. Interestingly enough, men who make their own lunches are teased, either by their work colleagues, or sometimes even by the show's narrator.

The faceless narrator who speaks English is another reason Lunch On is so engrossing. Her tone alternates between passive-aggressive and obsequious. She constantly apologizes for bothering subjects, while somehow managing, at the same time, to express a decidedly less apologetic perspective. For instance, one episode visited an office where a group of colleagues regularly make a giant hot pot in the office. None of the men involved in the hot pot cabal seemed to know much about cooking, so they broke a number of hot pot conventions, causing the narrator to naggingly question what the workers were doing. The narrator similarly couldn't hide her judgment about a woman who literally ran home on her lunch break while simultaneously eating her lunch so she could do housework.

Part of the reason Lunch On is so entertaining is that the producers understand that even people like me, who have an almost bottomless appetite for seeing what other people are eating, need another show angle. After all, there are 20 episodes a year, which is 10 hours of other people’s lunches (even more impressively, Salaryman’s Lunch is 30-35 episodes per season). So many of the other segments use lunch to frame a different hook. For instance, for the second segment, a producer might stand in the street, randomly asking people if she can go to lunch with them, interviewing the subject over a meal, not just about lunch, but about larger life issues, like the challenge of being a working mother in Japan. It's like Spalding Gray's "Interviewing the Audience" but with side dishes.

The third and final segment is often "The Lunch He Loved So Dearly," which focuses on a dead contemporary celebrity (with the term celebrity occasionally used as freely as our own Dancing with the Stars or Hollywood Squares use it) and a lunch the deceased enjoyed eating. The show will visit the restaurant where the lunch was made and talk about the meal, as well as how and why the departed enjoyed eating it. For instance, Eigo Kawashima, a singer/songwriter, would always visit the same okonomiyaki, or savory Japanese pancake, shop in Tokyo. The segment has the chef making the dish while the narrator describes it, creating a segment that's part food review and part obituary. There's never any video of the celebrity. Often, it's just a single headshot shown on a loop throughout the segment, like the subject was just photographed that one time. It's as weird as it is sweetly sincere.

That’s because Japan takes food seriously. There are magazines dedicated to bento, featuring tips and, of course, photographs. Japanese quiz shows often involve food knowledge. According to de St. Maurice, food is ingrained in popular culture because the Japanese are incredibly open-minded about it, making food a safe topic to discuss and read about. "The contemporary [Japanese] food scene is liberating. People aren't afraid to enjoy food. They're not ideological about it." Because of this, food is also often a focus of scripted Japanese television, both comedic and dramatic. I came to Lunch On after falling in love with Midnight Diner, a Japanese anthology drama airing on Netflix, that takes place in a diner (actually closer to what Americans might consider a gastropub). Each episode is titled after a dish, which also factors into the plot. It's a food-driven drama and it made me fall in love with Japanese food. It sent me to message boards, looking for similar shows, where eventually the Internet directed me to Lunch On.

I constantly think about if a show like Lunch On could work in the United States. In many ways, Japan is the inverse of the U.S., food culture-wise. While Japan is a homogeneous culture, there is great pride in making meals unique. Here in the States, we're a heterogeneous culture that takes great pride in making meals homogeneous. The legendary appeal of McDonald's is that each and every one that you step into is no different from any other. A show like Lunch On would have to work very hard to find unique American lunches.

There's also something about the sacredness of the Japanese lunch hour that feels quaint and old-fashioned when observed with an American sensibility. Americans with enough power to have a lunch break often take great pride in not taking advantage of it: "I'm so slammed at work. I wish I had time for lunch," someone will smugly brag. And people who could use a lunch break, like Uber drivers and other members of the gig economy, try to avoid an extended break, since every minute they're not working they're not getting paid.

Japan's work culture, although perhaps improving, is the stuff of my personal and professional nightmares. But their take on lunch, perhaps sans the forced coworker bonding, feels healthy. Food is important. Good food is important. Lunch On spotlights the importance of eating well. It's not about eating organic or eating fancy or even eating homemade. It's much more pragmatic. Lunch On, at its core, is about spotlighting lunches that will help you do what you need to do. It’s really about self-care. So instead of being disconnected from your lunch, feeling like it's a hurdle to be cleared, or even worse, intermittently fasting, which no one wants to hear about, think about what you want to accomplish after lunch and eat something that will get you there. And then pretend a camera crew is going to ask you to draw what you ate. Because maybe that will help you up your lunch game a little.



