When I was a business world creature, I learned about the mutual back-rubbing during the famous 3-martini lunch routine.
(Back-rubbing is such an equal-opportunity human behaviour that it takes place everywhere and anywhere and any time :=)
After jet-packing out of that, um, lunch sub-culture, I've tried to learn about healthy lunches. So, I'll show you my lunch and maybe you could show me your lunch :=) More below.

I’m a creature of habit. I like the same thing every day. In the Canadian Armed Forces we always knew that Thursday night’s supper menu, no matter which base we were on that day, would be Steak Night. We’d smell the onion-mushroom-meat fry as we’d walk up to the mess hall. Lovie indulges me in this, but she likes variety in her menu. So we compromise: lunch is my regular menu, while she varies hers a bit, and supper is everyone's favourites from our meal plans.

BTW, please see Martha's new series on resilient kitchens - http://caucus99percent.com/content/resilience-resilient-permaculture-kit...

In the old days before electric refrigeration and flying food products anywhere, folks used to can and pickle their fruits and vegetables in the fall for winter eating. I just love pickled veggies and that’s the main component of lunch.
We've been vegetarian for 25 years and for protein, we add cheeses - like different cheddars, cottage cheese, and/or feta cheese, along with some tofu “deli” slices.
We recently cut out (healthy, sigh) crackers in our (never-ending, always losing) war on too many carbohydrates. Sad, but necessary.

So, here’s what my lunch looks like. Plus, a tall glass of cold water. Lovely stuff, water is.

That's a far cry from my old lunch plates in the fancy restaurants of the business world :=) Plus, the beer and/or wine. Eish.
So, in the photo there's some pickled:
cucumbers
mixed veggies,
baby asparagus,
string beans,
olives - calamata and green,
baby bell peppers*
Lovie likes her spicy jar of pickled large asparagus (yikes, very spicy :=)
She also has a jar of pickled herring

*Thank you to C99 member Cachola for teaching me about the variety 'ajicito' - a baby bell pepper that she grows for her salads. I'm looking for it online, but Canadian seed suppliers don't know it (or know it by a different name.) I'll find it yet!

All right, so that's some progress towards more healthy lunch so far. What comes next in the rolling resiliency evolution?
Presently, we buy the jars of veggie pickles. Which was necessary to discover what is out there in the world of pickled veggies.
But, it's way too expensive. And not nearly as resilient as it could be.

For us, these are the next steps in the works:
First, we're gonna buy the veggies from the supermarket until June, when our local farmers market starts up. From then on, we'll buy veggies there to pickle at home. That's step two.
Second, we're gonna learn how to pickle our own veggies according to our tastes. Pickling recipes and advice would be most welcome! Lovie knows canning backwards and she used to help with pickling on the farm as a kid, but it's new territory for our family.
Step three is to grow veggies more specifically in our little garden for canning. So then this fall, we hope to pickle our homegrown veggies as well as the bought veggies. Hopefully over time, we could get to the point where we pickle all our veggies from our garden.

All this should reduce the cost of the family's veggies considerably. Plus, it would be great having our own stock of pickled veggies in the basement cool room, next to the canning, freeze-dried veggies, and dehydrator-dried veggies. And the jars and jars of lovely homemade jams :=)

So that's where we are along the way. Much more to go, but we're in motion. I look forward to hear your experiences, ideas, plans, and stories about pickling veggies and preserving food in general.

Peace be with us, if we work to make our food supply more resilient,
gerrit