Lunch, as we know it, is a modern phenomenon. Shaped by changing economies, changing work schedules, and changing ways of thinking about food, the midday meal presents a unique window into how food and culture interact. And accuse us of NYC-centrism if you must, but America's main center of lunch innovation has been, for the past 150 years, the Big Apple.

Or at least that's the premise of the New York Public Library's new exhibit, Lunch Hour NYC , which opens today at the library's main branch at Bryant Park. Split up into four sections--quick lunches, lunch at home, charitable lunches, and power lunch--the exhibit draws on the library's huge historical document and menu collection to shine light on how we've eaten over the past 150 years.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is a restored, working automat from Horn and Hardart, which was one of the city's largest automat chains from the early to the late twentieth century. There's no food allowed in the museum, sadly, but if you open one of the automat's little doors, you'll find a recipe for a dish that would have been served way back when (which you can take home, if you want to make some automat-style food for your fam).

**[#image: /photos/57e079fd4caff61056fa7f23]|||A Horn and Hardart automat, inside the NYPL |||(Credit: NYPL, Jonathan Blanc)

Laura Shapiro and Rebecca Federman, the two co-curators of the exhibit, were nice enough to talk to us about how lunching has changed over time, the surprisingly long history of sushi in New York, and who, exactly, is eating all the hot dogs in the city.

So, why do you think lunch and New York City are so connected?

Laura Shapiro: Our whole thesis is that lunch happened in New York because the type of city that New York is. It's a city built on work, and speed, and with a particular geography. All of these things came together to make lunch the characteristic meal that it is now.

And you think that this historical development happened in New York first?

LS: Well, it followed the wave of industrialization. As people started living by the clock, the midday meal that used to be called "dinner" shrinks, because you're supposed to be working. And in this country, because people came to New York to work--it wasn't the intellectual city, or the arts city, or the agricultural city, it was about work--lunch became this characteristic workday meal.

Do you get a chance to talk about eating at your desk in the exhibit? That seems to be pretty prevalent these days.

Rebecca Federman: The problem of what to do with workers during the day, or where workers were going to eat during the day, has really shaped the meal. In downtown New York, they'd go to quick lunch spots and sit at little chairs with desks attached, like you'd see in a lecture hall, and you sit down and you eat really quickly, pay with a ticket system up front, and get in and out really quickly. The Met Life Building is a fascinating case.

LS: Right, it opened in 1908, at 23rd and Madison Ave, and it's this huge building. They had 4,000 clerks working in that building, men and women. They had a gym, they had a medical office, they had everything. Once you got in the door, you didn't get out. So they had lunch rooms for all of these clerks, with men and women eating in separate rooms. When you were hired, you filled out a questionnaire where they asked you if you want coffee, or tea, or buttermilk, or milk, do you want fish on fridays, do you eat dessert, and then you had an assigned seat. And then when you got to your seat, a waitress rushed over, already knowing what you wanted to eat, and then you're out of there in 35 minutes, precisely as much time as you're allowed. And it's free!

I would love that, it's like much better airplane service. You mention that the lunch rooms were gender-divided--did women entering the workforce change lunch in any significant way?

LS: Well, speaking of eating at your desk, women were most often bringing lunch from home. They couldn't go out for lunch, for fear of getting jostled in the big crowds, or simply because they couldn't afford it, since they were getting paid half of what the men were. So they would bring lunch, or buy a cake or ice cream on the street, and take it back to the office. There was this whole genre of advice literature to working girls about how they should eat a nice, healthy lunch, instead of this junk food.

RF: And the cafeterias, the lunch spots, were very crowded, so there are also advice pieces about "what's a girl to do in a cafeteria?," because there are so many men around, and it's so busy, and what should they eat, and so on.

LS: But then you see chains like Schrafft's opening up by the '40s, where you had these very nice, feminine little restaurants with genteel service and ice cream and sandwiches on cheese bread and things like that. You had to make a little more money to go there, it wasn't cheap, but it was a real "ladies' lunch."

RF: Also, though, women going to work totally changed how kids ate. Lunch at home was the meal for women and children, but when women started working, these kids had nowhere to go for lunch. So they'd eat street food, which wasn't very healthy, so charity organizations stepped to feed them during the day. They were called "shut-outs," because they couldn't get back home to eat.

What kind of physical evidence is there for lunch at home, though?

RF: That's a very good question! There isn't much, sadly.

LS: You have a lot of advice literature and cookbooks, but really you have to look at things like the sale of bread, and the rise of peanut butter, and how these foodstuffs got into daily life.

Besides the automat, which is obviously awesome, do you have any favorite items in the show?

LS: Oh, well the Japanese menu is amazing.

RF: Yeah, we have a section on the iconic lunch foods of New York, and one of them is sushi. The accepted story is that sushi didn't come to New York until the '60s, after getting started in Los Angeles, but we found this menu in the collection from 1932, from a restaurant on 42nd Street, and it has sushi on it! And that could mean, you know, rice with vinegar, but it also has sashimi on the menu. We checked the property records for that spot, and sure enough, a Japanese restaurant existed there for about a year.

LS: And that's a good 30 years before anyone thought that there was sushi in New York. It was clearly not just catering to Japanese diners, too, because the menu is printed in English and Japanese. And their sukiyaki daily special came with the not-especially-Japanese appetizer of celery and olives, so you know they were trying to appeal to a mainstream clientele.

Do you think that lunch has changed much recently? It seems like people don't really just eat a hot dog for lunch, these days.

LS: But there's a hot dog cart on every corner! So who's eating all the hot dogs?

RF: I think people still are eating hot dogs. I mean, I'll go to Grand Central and get a hot dog sometimes.

We have an unhealthy BA staffer who claims to eat hot dogs for breakfast on the way into work.

RF: I hope it's cooked, not just straight out of the package.

No, it's from a stand. Though my little brother used to eat frozen hot dogs, straight out of the package. Like a meat-sicle.

RF: I saw a guy on the subway eating tortellini out of the box, uncooked.

It seems like people are eating lunch at their desks more and more, or just skipping it altogether--is lunch in decline?

RF: Yeah, we're trying to figure that out. The social element is dying, a little bit. There's a way to communicate now, with chatting, and Facebook, where you don't have to sit down, and spend the money, and you'd maybe rather wait til dinner.

How about the power lunch? Has that changed much since the 19th century?

LS: One thing we found is that power in the city is defined in different ways. Any group of like-minded people in New York is a power group, so we have things like artists' power lunches, at the Algonquin Round Table, or women's power lunches. The first women's club in the country was started over lunch at Delmonico's, precisely because Delmonico's refused to serve women not escorted by men. This was in 1868, they walked in, and they were served, and that became the first women's club.

RF: But yeah, there's always been a power lunch element to lunch in the city. While the clerks are stuck in the cafeteria, the suits get to go out on the town.

You can go check out Lunch Hour NYC at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Ave and 42nd Street. It's open from today (June 22nd) until February 17, 2013.