I prefer lunch to be merely adequate. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to ponder options or suffer the paradox of choice. I don’t want the “what do I feel like?” pondering.
This is the theory of the Norwegian matpakke. While it ultimately just means bagged lunch, the philosophy of the exercise is to purposefully not make too much of it. To make it satisfyingly adequate, and not strive for “delight me” goals we often sabotage ourselves with.
So often I just want a basic, unadorned sandwich. Some Dempster’s 12-grain toothsome bread. A slice of cheese. Some meat. Maybe some mustard.
For this reason I previously purchased a variety of “adequate” toppings to consider as mediocre candidates, and today is the first time I’ve tried corned beef from a can.
It tasted fine. The bread offers up copious amounts of fibre and nutrients, and the corned beef tasted better than I expected.
The part that surprised me was the macros. I honestly thought corned beef would be terrible from a nutrition perspective, but it’s actually a pretty heavy hitter. This sandwich brought 26g of protein from just the corned beef, another 10g from the bread (+6g fibre) and 7g from the cheese.
It’s the not insane saturated fat that surprised me the most. For that 26g of protein the corned beef brought just 8g of saturated fat. That’s still a lot, but it’s a much better ratio than I would have expected for what I assume is garbage-tier products. If I had four large eggs instead that would have been 24g of protein, but a slightly better 6.4g of saturated fat. Better, but I didn’t think corned beef would even be remotely competitive.
Random Extra Note: This video for GENER8ION - STORM by Yung Lean, is an absolute masterpiece. I enjoy the whole video, but this segment is just ridiculous. Every time YouTube recommends it I play it, each time simply amazed. Extraordinary by all of the participants.