Late Summer 2026: Lunch

Lunch can be a summer garden party; it can be an hours-long affair involving margaritas and many plates and dynamic conversation among friends. It can be a sweet scrap of a lunch break spent with a life partner or a grandmother, or a simple sandwich seasoned with aspen views. Often as not, though, lunch is a burrito wolfed down between errands, a few mindless bites eaten quickly in front of a screen, or nothing at all.

In this issue of edible New Mexico, we celebrate lunch. To start, we zero in on the lunch spots that, fairly or not, have among the worst reputations in the nation: school cafeterias. Investigating the rollout of New Mexico’s universal school meals program, Sarah Wentzel-Fisher finds that it’s about a lot more than free lunch, with ripple effects that reach beyond meeting the immediate—and not insignificant—need of filling empty stomachs. In another feature, Sarah Mock visits with high school and college students working with a statewide University of New Mexico project to inventory and repurpose food that would otherwise go from trash to landfill. Visiting Valencia County, we learn about a partnership between a high school culinary program and a unique residential campus for seniors.

Given the season, we’re also including a few stories to inspire lunch outdoors. Santa Fe–based naturalist Priyanka Kumar writes of how her love for apples and orchards and wildlife has drawn her to steward patches of nature that she calls microwilds. There’s a recipe for mugolio made from foraged green pine cones, which first calls for getting to know the interwoven lives of the Southwest’s juniper-piñon forests. And, drawn as much by the spirit of France’s century-plus-old ban on dining at work as by the baguettes, we visit a certain bakery and café in Santa Fe where, holding true to French tradition, you’re invited to let lunch last. 

In gathering these stories, we’ve been pushed to rediscover lunch, to give ourselves permission for midday pleasures. In that spirit, the sixth edition of Savor the Mother Road highlights places to lunch on some of the most storied blocks of Route 66. But we are realists, too, so we also offer a set of recipes to help you pull together knockout salads that can serve just as well for a solitary noon break as for a luncheon. Wherever you eat lunch and however much time you can take on it, we hope that it nourishes you—and that these stories do, too.

Lunch can be a summer garden party; it can be an hours-long affair involving margaritas and many plates and dynamic conversation among friends. It can be a sweet scrap of a lunch break spent with a life partner or a grandmother, or a simple sandwich seasoned with aspen views. Often as not, though, lunch is a burrito wolfed down between errands, a few mindless bites eaten quickly in front of a screen, or nothing at all.

In this issue of edible New Mexico, we celebrate lunch. To start, we zero in on the lunch spots that, fairly or not, have among the worst reputations in the nation: school cafeterias. Investigating the rollout of New Mexico’s universal school meals program, Sarah Wentzel-Fisher finds that it’s about a lot more than free lunch, with ripple effects that reach beyond meeting the immediate—and not insignificant—need of filling empty stomachs. In another feature, Sarah Mock visits with high school and college students working with a statewide University of New Mexico project to inventory and repurpose food that would otherwise go from trash to landfill. Visiting Valencia County, we learn about a partnership between a high school culinary program and a unique residential campus for seniors.

Given the season, we’re also including a few stories to inspire lunch outdoors. Santa Fe–based naturalist Priyanka Kumar writes of how her love for apples and orchards and wildlife has drawn her to steward patches of nature that she calls microwilds. There’s a recipe for mugolio made from foraged green pine cones, which first calls for getting to know the interwoven lives of the Southwest’s juniper-piñon forests. And, drawn as much by the spirit of France’s century-plus-old ban on dining at work as by the baguettes, we visit a certain bakery and café in Santa Fe where, holding true to French tradition, you’re invited to let lunch last. 

In gathering these stories, we’ve been pushed to rediscover lunch, to give ourselves permission for midday pleasures. In that spirit, the sixth edition of Savor the Mother Road highlights places to lunch on some of the most storied blocks of Route 66. But we are realists, too, so we also offer a set of recipes to help you pull together knockout salads that can serve just as well for a solitary noon break as for a luncheon. Wherever you eat lunch and however much time you can take on it, we hope that it nourishes you—and that these stories do, too.

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