Eating at the Office: Pack a Lemon in Your Lunch Bag

This time of year, our lunches can start to feel a lot like the weather outside – gloomy. Especially when we're eating them under fluorescent lights. Lately, we've been tossing a lemon into our lunch bag, and it's helped to brighten up our meals.

We're big on packing lunches that don't require a lot of prep work at home – it's hard enough to get out the door in the morning! For that reason, we keep a few staples in our desk drawer, like a salt shaker, a little pepper grinder and small bottle of olive oil. And lately, our daily routine has included grabbing a lemon before we head out for the day.

Here are a few ways it's come in handy:

Squeeze into drinks. Tea is the obvious one here, but it's also great for water bottles.
Brighten up leftovers. Some dishes aren't better the next day. If your soup or pasta has lost a bit of freshness, a little lemon can go a long way.
Dress a salad. Don't bother with transporting dressing from home. If you keep olive oil on hand, some fresh lemon juice is all you need.
Make a meal on the fly. Remember our tips for turning a single vegetable into a whole meal? A lemon can be a big help with that. For instance, instead of making a sandwich in the morning, grab a couple slices of bread, an avocado and a lemon. Toast the bread, spread on the avocado and top with lemon juice, salt and pepper. Lunch is ready.

Originally published January 26, 2010.

(Image: Flickr user CoCreatr, licensed under Creative Commons)

Comments (23)

or just sprinkle a little salt on the cut lemon and eat it. Yum!

That sounds like a good idea....even just seeing a lemon can cheer me up. :)

My great lunch idea lately is to bring a potato. I just wash it and maybe take a salad or something along with me! I keep a partial stick of butter in the fridge here, as well as salt and pepper of course.

Great suggestion--and it's alkaline, for those of us who drink too much coffee!

I do ! I do! the lovely Heidi Swanson inspired me moons ago... I keep a small bottle of olive oil at the office - I never use store bought salad dressings anymore.... And it's been a great help in curbing my salt addiction... lemon zest instead has been a beautiful thing :)

@jen_g - lemon juice is anything but alkaline! It's quite acidic!

@aperocot Lemon is actually alkaline, not acidic on nutrition sense. Here's some info on it:

http://godsdirectcontact.com/vegetarian/ch/aa.htm

But what do you do with it at lunch in the office?

jen_g, I hate to be a debbie downer, but that link contains about the same relationship to actual chemistry that Jabberwocky does. Lemon juice is acidic, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

Of course, the chemical compounds in lemon juice can undergo chemical reactions, and the pH of the byproducts might be different from the pH of the reactants. However, the lemon juice is no longer lemon juice at that point.

Anyway, the pH of your food is irrelevant to the nutritional value.

I think jen_g was referring to the potato from nikki moore's comment as being alkaline, not the lemon.

Here I was thinking someone else would post about the photo for this picture... it was a thumbnail on the AT page and well, I think my mind is in the gutter! lol

dunklekatze - i'm glad to see i'm not alone down here! LOL all I could think of were yellow boobs in my lunch bag = NSFW! hahaahahhahah

The avocado trick is filling and delicious evertime! That's exactly what I did today!

Just to reiterate what frum has said, lemon juice has a very low pH and its metabolic fate does not dictate its food "type" - in fact the GI diet suggests dropping some lemon juice in water to lower its pH as this can supposedly help.

the chemistry on the link provided by the other poster is wrong (I have a doctorate in chemistry, so trust me on this one) - lemon is laced with citric acid and ascorbic acid (vitamin C) - when it gets to the stomach, it's also bathed in acid and I can't see how "[W]ith different point of view" we can change basic acid-base chemistry to suit us.

I want to squeeze those lemons.

Old school peppermint sticks in the lemon to suck up the juice, YUM!

Plain lime/lemon juice is my favorite way to dress salads.

hey jen_g and Mona D, if you think lemon is alkaline i've got a bridge to sell you.

citrus is acidic outside and inside the body, i don't care what any alternative medicine blog has to say about it. when i drink orange juice i get heartburn, my stomach can't deal with the additional ACID, chaos ensues.

/end rant/

as for the post this is a great idea, just the smell is a pick me up, i also like bringing tangerines on long car trips. scratch and sniff = no motion sickness. i'm a weird one.

@jess13 - I LOVE the smell or oranges being peeled! Helps perk me up, too.

As for lemons being acidic? You can use them as batteries. Enough said.

I see a lively debate about whether lemons are acidic or alkaline. According to my husband's urologist, lemons are both - with the key being how they are metabolized by the body.

Outside the body lemons measure 2.3 ph, which puts them firmly in the acid category. However, the body converts acidic juices such as lemon into alkaline, thereby allowing them to help balance patients with acidic-testing urine (acidosis).

He explained that what he was taught in medical school is being transformed by nutritional research. In fact, he admitted that many medical schools do not really stress nutrition so they are not keeping up on new research as well as they could.

He said foods are now being divided into two categories: acid-forming, alkaline-forming. What a particular food is outside the body doesn't necessarily indicate what it will be once it affected by the chemical processes involved in digestion and absorption.

People suffering from osteoporosis, cancer, certain types of kidney stones and many other diseases, are increasingly being told to follow an alkaline-based diet.

Human blood is usually considered in a healthy range if its ph is 7.35 to 7.45. When blood or urine tests higher, the body is vulnerable to disease. Diet, stress, and environmental factors are amongst the things that affect ph in the body.

We were very confused by this advice because it seemed counter-intuitive. What made it worse was being told that dairy products are acid-producing. Most people drink milk to sooth the stomach, but it actually becomes acidic in the system.

So, it was great reluctance that we adopted the urologist's advice, but surprise - it worked. Drinking a glass of water into which we squeezed half a lemon once or twice a day helped neutralize a high acidic urine.

This was not guess-work or what some seem to think as "woo-woo" alternative medicine. It was proved by lab work.

This information was critical after my kidneys almost shut down after a reaction to a new super-antibiotic, I had to use litmus strips to test my urine for weeks afterward. I had to maintain an alkaline balance in my diet. I, too, was told to drink lemon water at least twice a day and to avoid most acid-forming foods, just like my husband was advised by his urologist.

The National Osteoporosis Society of the UK now recommends an alkaline-forming diet because of recent nutritional research. This acid-forming and alkaline-forming data is slowly transforming medical opinion.

I highly recommend that doubters research how our bodies metabolize various foods. What we were once thought or were taught is changing. I was as shocked as anyone, but it seems to be true.

BTW, the urologist's opinion was changed when he was proofreading his daughter's thesis. She was working on her Ph.D. in nutritional studies. Because the info on lemons caught his attention, he challenged her and she directed him to the studies she had been exposed to while studying. He was so convinced, that he immediately changed his advice to patients and says he has seen improvements in their conditions.

Is he right? Well, I subscribe to the belief that if something is true it works. This seems to work. We are both much healthier thanks to following an alkaline-forming diet.

That said, check with your own physicians and ask questions - taking in evidence of new research if necessary to see if your doctors are up on the latest information (no one can know everything). As I said earlier, we were as shocked as anyone that lemons would be recommended to calm an acidic system.

Addendum to my comment: not all dairy products are acid-producing. Yogurt, raw milk, acidophilus milk and buttermilk are considering to be alkaline-producing.

I remember thinking my mother was nuts and ridiculing her as only a know-it-all teenager can when she downed glasses of buttermilk when she wasn't feel well. Guess she was intuitively answering her body's need to become less acidic. I wish I could apologize to her (she passed away a few years before I was exposed to these new theories).

Naughty lemons are nauuuuughty...

I'm trying to drink more water...boring... and adding lemon makes it more interesting for me. LOVE lemons! I put zest and juice in everything.
Oooo the smell and color is so uplifting... I think I'm going to start keeping some in a bowl on my desk after reading this.

...and I must agree, that's a fine set of lemons, you have there...;D

i loooooooove buttermilk. Everyone looks at me like I'm crazy when I say I like it plain in a glass.