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A friend stopped by around lunchtime the other day, and I fear his timing has tarnished my reputation for hospitality.

Guests in my home are routinely treated to delicious, healthy food. Among friends, I have a bit of a culinary reputation. I bake from scratch, and pride myself on providing a well-balanced, delicious and nutritious diet for my family. When they describe my cuisine as “crunchy,” they’re not always referring to the texture.

“Why does everything have to be gourmet,” my oldest daughter often whines, her way of telling me something is a little over-the-top too healthy.

When it comes to my mid-day meal, however, I fail miserably.

Treated to lunch in a restaurant, I will happily consume the best selection on the menu. But most days, I’m home alone, scrounging for whatever I can find. It’s got to be quick and it has to not take that much effort.

It usually isn’t much.

My husband will spend an entire lunch hour meticulously crafting — and consuming — a picture-perfect sandwich, chips, fruit on the side and a fizzy drink to sip well into the afternoon. He is so adamant about lunch as a meal, it’s line item in the family budget. He’s memorized the lunch special calendars at all the local diners and looks forward to Tortilla Soup Thursday all week.

I’m just not that into it.

I’m not sure of the exact cause, but I’m fairly certain it has to do with estrogen, and the fact that I’m always trying to do too much (which, actually, I think also has to do with estrogen). I often forget to stop and eat. In high school and college, it was cool to skip meals to stay super thin, so I didn’t need much of an excuse. Early in my career, I scored overachiever points by working through lunch. When my kids came along, I was so consumed with taking care of them, I often just picked on whatever they left on their plate — soggy Cheerios or the peas from Campbell’s soup.

Now, lunch skipping is an established habit.

Mind you, I still make sure my kids eat well at noon. When they were preschoolers, I made a Mid-Day Event of peanut butter and jelly or macaroni and cheese—homemade peanut butter, with homemade jam (from berries I picked), on homemade bread. Now, items they request for their daily brown bags are generously stocked in the pantry: fresh fruit, deli meat, yogurt, bags of their favorite chips and “fun-size” candy bars. I routinely deposit money into their school lunch accounts so they can enjoy pizza days or won’t go hungry if they forget their lunches.

But by the time I’m done stocking groceries for their lunches, I hardly want to think about my own. And when I do, I remember the 30 pounds from the last baby that have yet to “fall off,” and feel obliged to purchase something that would contribute to my overall fitness goals: low-fat, no-fat, low-carb. I purchased single-serving packs of tuna about six months ago, but honestly, who gets the mid-day munchies and thinks, “Mmm, Chicken-of-the Sea!”? I have been known to consume chocolate-covered almonds with an energy drink and call it a “meal.” Or, on a particularly hormonal day, yogurt with a side of Baby Ruth candy bars works, too.

I’m guessing this is a fairly common dilemma. A certain editor-friend confessed to a lunch of baloney, straight from the container, washed down with green tea. Yet another friend routinely eats only M & M’s at lunch; another, potato chips. Diet Coke and frozen yogurt are standard lunch fare for another friend. For me, skipping lunch isn’t the problem. It’s all those hours that follow lunch that are the problem. Around 2 or 3 p.m., I’m so darn hungry I could eat … well, where are all those fun-sized candy bars I bought for the kids’ lunches?

I’ve heard the lectures. I know it’s not good for me. Maybe it’s just easier to take care of everyone else and let the chips fall where they may — so to speak — when it comes to my lunch.

But I didn’t bother explaining all this to my friend when he came by at lunchtime the other day. To him, I just apologized and asked him if he wanted a Baby Ruth.

Humor writer, Hallie Bandy, is the mother of four children and lives on a farmette in rural Kentucky--both of which provide more than enough fodder for her writing.  She is a regular ShareWIK.com columnist.

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