Why I Invert My Lunch

Preface

It’s been a long time since I posted, but I’ve been accumulating post ideas for almost a year in the meantime. I had my first child between then and now which I will use as a defensible excuse for my absence.

To get back on the saddle, I thought I would kick things off with the personal tale of why I “invert” my lunch. It’s fatuous fun, and I think it is relevant to software design as I will explain at the end.

I dedicate this post to Jason Yuen and Bryce Kwan who have always commented on my lunch and to whom I’ve never fully bothered to explain my rationale—until now.

Why I Invert My Lunch

First Some Facts

I eat a pretty big lunch. In fact, I eat a lot in general, and enjoy doing it.

I also have a tendency to bring lunch to work. Cost aside, it’s faster than going out for lunch, and I find eating out a lot can become a bit tiring.

My meals tend to be composed of a carb like rice or pasta (I love pasta…and am of Chinese descent), a meat, and a veggie. I like things saucy because sauce is delicious.

I heat my lunch up in the microwave.

The Process

I bring the meal from home in a container with the carb, let’s say rice, at the bottom of the container, and the saucy meat and veg contents on the top.

Here’s a picture of my lunch on it’s way to work.


At work I transfer the food onto a plate by flipping the container over.



The result is my apparently unusual inverted lunch arrangement where the rice sort of falls all over the other food hiding it and making it look like I am eating nothing more than a huge mound of rice. This gives rise to comments from Messrs Yuen and Kwan such as: “Wow man, got enough rice there?!”

The Rationale

There are actually several reasons why I find this lunch packing and reheating approach desirable.

1. Sauce Preservation

Firstly, since I like dishes that are saucy, I like the maximum amount of sauce to survive in it’s original state to when I am eating it. By storing the saucy meat and veg on the top during storage, as gravity pulls the sauce down towards the bottom of the container, you have a buffer of rice to soak it up first, preserving the goodness. If the sauce were on the bottom, then you tend to lose more because it sticks to the container and doesn’t scrape off well with your lunch fork. This is the least important reason for the inversion, however.

2. Even Heating

I won’t get into detail on how microwave ovens work but a few key points are important.

Microwaves use dielectric heating which basically means they heat by agitating molecules that are polar, particularly water, fat, and sugar. Long story short, in practice substances with more water, fat, or sugar, heat up more readily.

This leads to the common misconception that microwaves cook food from the inside out. This only really appears to happen when foods have less polar molecules in their exterior (eg. are drier on the outside). In truth, microwaves are just like any other cooking technique and heat up the outer layers of food first.

By leveraging these facts about microwaves, I can achieve more even heating of my lunch by using the inverted configuration which places the typically drier, less sugary and fatty carbs on the exterior of the lunch. As my purely illustrative chart below shows, with a regular configuration the dielectric-heating-resistant items are kept in the interior of the food, which doesn’t make sense.  By contrast with the inverted configuration, the carbs get the heating benefit of being on the edge, while meat and veg which generally heat up more easily are kept in the interior. Thus everything comes to the right eating temperature closer to the same time and with less overcooking which reduces the nutritional value of vegetables, and makes food less yummy!

If you were to extend the x-axis on the graph further to simulate a larger lunch portion, you will see the temperature range becomes more and more dramatic. As mentioned in the beginning, I eat a pretty big lunch, so the affect of uneven heating is more noticeable.

The results, of course, vary on what exactly you are cooking, but I find that this technique works very well for the kind of food I eat. Those curious will be interested to verify that rice water content is in fact lower than vegetable water content which supports my experience. While meat water content is about the same as cooked rice, it has a much higher fat content for sure, which in practice attain even higher temperatures than water, making meat heat up faster.

3. Cleaning

Porous plastic storage containers have a tendency to get stained by sauces, particularly tomato-based ones. Reducing the amount of contact between sauce and the container helps keep your tupperware looking like new.

Even more important though, the meat and veg, particularly if they are saucy, will have a tendency to splatter when heated up a lot. Cleaning up a microwave after a splatter is never fun. So keeping them underneath the secure cover of rice lets the rice act like a blast suppression blanket, reducing cleanup!

Are You a Maniac Designer?

So there you have it. I’ve finally divulged the reasoning for my inverted lunch. Those reading this article who think I am most peculiar for applying such analysis to such a mundane matter as lunch re-heating…are probably right. I’ve ended up here in large part because as I mentioned earlier, I do like to eat, and I eat quite a bit.

However I also think this silly example highlights thinking processes which good designers should go through instinctively. Namely:

1. See problems where others don’t.
2. Imagine how things could be better.
3. Iterate until improvement is found.

In the this case I have altered my food microwaving technique to the point of me inverting my lunch over many iterations of food reheating. But at any given time, somewhere around the world, I assure you that the same instincts are guiding the craft of designers, whether it be of software or anything else.

Something for anyone interested in honing their design skills to remember!