Canal House Cooks Lunch, Lunch Studio, Meal Project

Make the midday meal a memorable event

Ever since we were kids, we've had a fascination with other people's lunches.

Unfortunately, adulthood has turned the midday meal into a grab-and-go affair, with little time to enjoy a meal, much less someone else's.

But thanks to the introspective nature of the World Wide Web, lunch is getting its due once more.

Canal House Cooks Lunch, the daily glimpse into the afternoon eating habits of cookbook authors Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton, is frustratingly gorgeous. We admire and covet the "thrown together"–though admittedly studied–meals of polenta with ratatouille or whole branzino cooked on a bed of Meyer lemons and potatoes. The blog posts don't include recipes, so the repast is a limited to an aesthetic one.

For those who would prefer to eat out vicariously, New York City's Lunch Studio captures the finds of the city's lunch crowd, from takeout sandwiches to afternoon snacks.

And now it's your turn: Art House Co-Op, an organization that's focused on fostering global, crowd-sourced art collaboration, has created an event called the Meal Project. The goal: Eaters around the world document their meals at noon on February 24, then share their documentation with others. The result is a snapshot of a global, simultaneous meal. Enter the project here.

We've never been more ready for a lunch break.