How To Make The Unusual (But Tasty) Tuna Salad David Lynch Ate Every Day

The late David Lynch made some of the strangest, most beautifully unsettling images in American cinema, but he preferred his lunch contain very few creative surprises. In a 2000 "Charlie Rose" interview, Lynch spoke about his daily routine, revealing that he ate the same meal every day: "tomatoes, tuna fish, feta cheese, and olive oil." For him, the repetition was a feature, not a bug. When Rose scoffed, Lynch responded, somewhat defensively, that the simple meal is "very good."

Lynch was famously devoted to routines and described having order in his everyday life as a foundation that freed his mind to go elsewhere. Considering the art he made, keeping lunch extremely normal and rigidly predictable makes a certain amount of sense. Of course, calling the meal a "tuna salad" requires a little interpretation. All he does is list the four ingredients — he didn't offer quantities, describe the preparation, or even say that he combined them together. He didn't specify the kind of tuna, either, but it was probably canned since the meal seemed designed to meet the needs of someone who didn't want to tear themselves away from their work.

Anyone familiar with the creamed corn scene in "Twin Peaks" would probably hesitate to make assumptions about how David Lynch might present a meal. However, if we were to offer our best-guess, practical recreation of his lunch, it would probably look like canned tuna tossed with chopped tomatoes and crumbled feta and then mixed (and dressed generously) with olive oil.

Lynch's art may have been pretty out there, but it's a straightforwardly winning recipe: salty feta, rich tuna, and olive oil are complemented by juicy, acidic tomatoes. That's a fairly coherent lunch, and its solid nutrient-density-wise, too. Tuna is high protein, tomatoes contain vitamin C and the antioxidant lycopene, feta adds more protein and calcium, and olive oil provides mostly unsaturated fat. The ingredients are modular, so quantities can easily be adjusted depending on taste and appetite.

Vinegar appears in several fan recreations of Lynch's lunch, sometimes balsamic with a squeeze of lemon. Although Lynch didn't mention it every time, there are some accounts of another iteration of his habitual lunch do include vinegar, which would add brightness and balance out the simple flavor. If you're trying to get a little taste of the genius through his lunch ritual, add a splash of vinegar. Fans who have tried the combination have been enthusiastic about how good such a simple meal can be.

That said, there is one reason you may not want to follow Lynch's routine with total fidelity: mercury. Read the label on your canned tuna, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has noted that even canned light tuna, one of the lower-mercury varieties, should be limited to two or three times a week, max. Then again, if you're hoping to capture some of Lynch's strange magic (and create some of the most hallucinatory masterpieces of cinema), perhaps the secret ingredient is strict adherence to a high-mercury lunch routine.