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Comment by xte | Hacker News Reader

Hem, I't common in any country of the world, perhaps with different names, different food, different packing but the same principles.

In Italy is called "schiscetta" (read in English Skishetta), in Japan is called "bento" etc...

In few countries however such kind of "productivity" is considered a kind of (self) slavery and it's not really accepted. For instance in Swiss it not common at all eat in your workplace no matter the provenance of food because we do not live for work but the contrary. In French is common only for low-paid labors, mostly young at career start etc.

Have seen the different idea of productivity in few countries and their relevant economic level I think there is no real correlation...

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In Portugal is called "marmita". Despite having been laundered a bit (healthier food than restaurants) during last years, it is still mostly correlated with low-paid labour. You will hardly ever see a well paid worker taking lunch from home.

In Brazil its called that as well, but these days its more associated with fitness people and meal prepping in my mind.

Here its mostly buffet restaurants (huge restaurants many times) where you "make your plate and pay per kg", and there is always dessert and fried food.

In Lisbon I saw mostly restaurants where you pay for a "menu" (a "special plate" for the day) which made it easier for me to control my intake, easier for the smallish restaurants to prepare, etc.

(I rather liked eating a quick lunch at my last job - heated in the microwave - since I could I can leave at 16h15 instead of 17 and beat the traffic...)

There is a cultural factor too in addition to economic one. E.g. in India, packed lunches are very common and even movie stars get their, admittedly elaborate, lunches packed from home. It is getting somewhat less common for double-income-no-kids type families but still quite prevalent in general. The dabba[0] system used to deliver home-made packed-lunches from home to the office desk gained international fame.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala

>In few countries however such kind of "productivity" is considered a kind of (self) slavery and it's not really accepted. For instance in Swiss it not common at all eat in your workplace no matter the provenance of food because we do not live for work but the contrary. In French is common only for low-paid labors, mostly young at career start etc.

This is fascinating and very interesting from a radical point of view. A while ago there was a thread on HN about if it would be bad for a workplace to have bunks and a kitchen such that employees can sleep there. To me the whole idea felt incredibly dystopian. In the end, though, some authors have observed a kind of cultural shift, in which we are no longer told what to do at work, but rather the workplace tries to align our desire to theirs, the analogy Frédéric Lordon[0] uses is that desires can be expressed as vectors, and the modern workplace, lacking the old methods to make us work (because they are culturally inappropriate, or illegal) must use such a method which seems a whole lot less pernicious at face value.

It's not only the time to make the lunch which counts as unpaid labour, it's also the time and expense to travel to work (and according to some stories on HN this can get to absurd levels) and due to the phenomena I mentioned a lot of time spent around work doing non-work activities (though this is more common if there is a "workplace culture").

[0] "Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire"

Take it with veeery long fireplace tongs but IMO any living being, not only human try to have the most he/she want at the least "cost" so we humans during our evolution we do various kind of effort with various kind of success to have more working less.

Nowadays we struggle a lot less to accomplish many tasks we need, for instance we can cut wood with machines so quickly and with very little fatigue, we can dig ground with an excavator in minutes instead of hours and hours of manual work with shovel and pickaxe etc.

Naturally for us it's still "fatigue" so we want do automate more, work less. That's natural nor positive nor negative (we may say that avoid struggling and have much free time is positive and counterarguments that we discover obesity, diabetes and many other disease due to that) but trying to bend it to have people work is a subtle form of slavery.

For instance Google classic "game-fill workplace" to me is more a way to "capture" workforce than a nice way of work...

Of course I'd like to work in my favorite field so work seems more pleasure than work but with some limits: work is work, play is play. Even if they seems to blend work have expiring dates, require a certain kind of attention and do not require other kind of attention. Play have normally no expiring dates, no guarantees etc.

Long story short my own personal "best compromise" way is being responsible adults that try to play together for our own sake. The modern idea of reject individual responsibilities and so being directed like sheep in the flock happily ignorant is not really different than ancient slavery and it certainly not a thing I like.

You shouldn’t have been downvoted. This is an interesting perspective that’s relevant to the article.

Perhaps that's due to my terrible English... However I see few "downvote trends" not against me but against certain "families of arguments", normally without zero accompany comments to explain why, counterargument etc

Perhaps it can be a nice analysis to made on whole HN comments to "track" the trend and discover why...

Japan's bento seem way more on the crafted and enjoyable side of things though. I'm certain there's a lot of variations, but I've seen folks wax poetic about bento and ekiben (train station bentos).

I am Australian, but when I worked in the city one of the most reasonably priced and healthy options was a Japanese restaurant's bento boxes. Quick and easy but also filling. You can also get cheap and hearty meals from the china town food courts. Packing lunches makes total financiak sense but I guess I have a hard time spending my only free hour during the day time at the same place I will be at for 8 hours. A walk and some time lost amongst the hustle and bustle clears my mind.

Agreeable.

Not true for the Swiss, it is quite common for people to bring a lunch, only for the offices in central districs is it more common to go somewhere else to eat.

My experience of Swiss is really limited and "in central district" but... The first time I bring my meal I was told like a father to a child "no, here you work, there you eat, we are humans not slave nor machine" and it wasn't a "left-wing extremist"...

Yes, you won't eat at your desk, usually a few people will go to a kitchen area or meeting room and eat together. It definitely isn't the American style of eat-while-you-work.

No way that in Italy is called schiscetta, I never heard it, maybe it is some dialectal word, for sure it’s not Italian. And I never ever saw everyone bringing always packed lunch at work in Italy.

It's Milanese. The problem with generalizing Italian culture is that there's roughly 20 of them in Italy, as many are unaware we're essentially 20 countries squished together hastily 150ish years ago and still working on becoming one.

That's a curious and a bit off topic phenomenon: in some countries dominant class have tried to form people to create a real country, that's Russian Tsar Peter the Great for instance that create a sort of "Intelligentsia" to create a united country and that's result in Russian October revolution (that's was led in fact by Peter's Intelligentsia not by "proletarians") in Italy we do the opposite and the country is still not really united. In Germany even if there were far less language differences and even if Germany was united "before" people coming from ex-DDR zone still act "as strangers" in the ex-"west Germany" zones.

I never really study history in that sense but decoupling parochialism and substantial differences between people's in a country may be an interesting exercise :-)

It's Milan's dialect but commonly used in all north Italy and maybe in many part of the center (I'm Italian)...

Of course not everyone bring food from home, especially in big towns where "worker's launch" cost around 9/10 euros, but that's the name I always hear. And it has on many journals recently (so, not only in north Italy) due to a series of litigation between schools and parent that do not want their child to eat school-provided food coming from obscure cooperative society often at the center of many scandal for low quality food and hygiene. Few examples:

- https://www.luinonotizie.it/2018/11/07/luino-schiscetta-a-sc...

- http://www.oggiscuola.com/web/2017/01/29/la-schiscetta-class...

- https://www.tgcom24.mediaset.it/perlei/articoli/1098601/le-r...

- https://www.wired.it/lifestyle/food/2016/09/27/schiscetta-sc...

- https://d.repubblica.it/attualita/2016/09/16/news/mense_scol...

- https://www.ilmattino.it/primopiano/cronaca/schiscetta_scuol...

This last one is a Naple's journal.

This just testifies the amazing bad state of Italian journalism, it doesn’t make “schiscetta” an Italian word. I am also Italian and I never heard it before today and you can’t find it in Italian dictionaries.

Italy is a relative young union of many states that does not exactly speak Italian. How many word you know that coming from some dialect being "Italianized" and even in few dictionary BUT they are only know in few part of Italy?

Just an example:

- waste. Official italian's worlds for that are "spazzatura" or "rifiuti" however in north Italy we commonly use "rumenta" from Genoas/Ancient Republic dialect. In the center-south and south "monnezza" is the most used term.

- posacenere is the most used word for ashtray (ancient portacenere) while in the south nearly anybody use "ceneriera" that coming from spanish "cenicero".

- in Tuscany Melone is not the melon like any other region of Italy, is actually mortadella the famous salami and the melon is "popone". And that's Italian, not dialect.

- again in tuscany "mesticheria" is what the rest of Italy call drogheria (grocery store)

- edicola is the most common word for the place you go to buy newspapers, while in the south is "giornalaio" and sometimes it's used in the center and few north area. In the south edicola is a religious image often sculpted in few ancient houses corners or in church.

- the school bag is normally named "zaino" but sometimes also cartella, while in Lombardy and few part of Piedmont is often named mappetta. All of them are Italian world.

I can continue for long. Language evolve and sometime a language specked by different people from different origins changes. For instance in Swiss, in Italian cantons "fare i fari" or "lapeggiare" (flashing with car headlights) is "bilux" or "biluxare", order something instead of ordinare/fare un ordine is comandare/fare una comanda, mobile phones instead of "cellulare" are named "natel" (that's even do not sound Italian at all). Etc. The same for French in metropolitan French vs Swiss vs Quebec etc.

To really know a language you need to speak it daily with native speaker otherwise you always encounter terms you do not know and even can't find on dictionary or without apparent meaning. Think about English "being at cloud nine", translate it in Italian. It's meaningless. Italian version is "being at seventh sky" that's also meaningless for an English speaker in turn.

Two more school-related examples from Tuscany.

The Latin lapis for pencil instead of matita.

What do you erase the blackboard with? The correct Italian term is cimosa, but you'd hardly hear it outside Tuscany.

I'm also reminded of a discussion I once had with my grandma (a retired Latin teacher from Milan), when she heard someone say a word she claimed was dialect. As it turns out the word coccia comes from the Latin cochlea, which is a snail shell. Even after having taught Latin for 40 years, she didn't know the word...

Also seventh sky might not work in English, but seventh heaven works.

Oh, thanks personally I here "lapis" when I was a child by my grandparents, mostly referred to nearly finished (short) pencils, but I never hear "cimosa" always say "cancellino" or sometimes "cancelletto" instead :-)

Never hear "coccia" before you normally I used "guscio" or "conchiglia" or "valva/e" depending on the context... On Tuscany I remember from an ex girlfriend from Livorno that "vetro" (glass) is where you drink (well... a glass of ...) but also for coffee cups because tazza or tazzina (cup, small cup) is WC ceramic but, not a thing used to drink :D

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