TweetOK, so you don’t feel like going to the effort of making sandwiches and sticking them in a box to take to work. Why should you do this rather than taking advantage of the canteen or the local bakery to provide you with some midday sustenance? Is it really worth the bother? Well, I’ll give you three reasons why you should.

1. It’s cheaper to make your own lunch. Let’s say you have a filled roll for lunch every day, which you’ve bought ready-made and packed from the local supermarket. If one pack of chicken and salad sandwiches costs approximately £1.80, then this means that over the course of one year, you will be spending 1.80 x 5 x 47 (allowing for four weeks’ days off, plus odd sick leave days, etc.) = £423.00. And that’s just for a pair of sandwiches. If you want more than a couple of slices of bread, some lettuce, meat and mayo, then the cost will go up. Not that making your own lunch is free. But it does cost a lot less.

2. It creates much less waste. Look at all that plastic wrapping on those ready-made sandwiches in your supermarket aisles. None of that plastic is recyclable, so it all goes into the waste stream. By making your own lunch, you reduce the amount of waste you produce. Of course, if you wrap your sandwiches in clingfilm, you will still be adding waste. However, you can eliminate the need for clingfilm wrap by using airtight containers (which includes re-used ziplock bags and old ice cream containers – an extra green star for you if you use these!) to keep the bread fresh. And let’s consider the waste produced by buying a little bottle of water or a disposable cup of coffee a day. OK, paper cups and PET bottles are recyclable, so you can square buying these with your conscience –sort of – but it’s even better if you can fill a re-usable bottle with water and use a china cup to fill up at the office coffee machine. Your office doesn’t have a coffee machine (or you don’t work in an office because you’re a contractor)? Then it’s time for you to either invest in and bring along a small coffee maker to your office (you’ll be very popular with your colleagues if you do) or invest in a good old-fashioned thermos flask.

3. It’s healthier. Taking a glance at the sandwiches on offer at Tescos at the moment, I can see a pleasing range of wholegrain and wholemeal bread and plenty of salad, but also lots of fatty mayonnaise, and plenty of cured meats with extra preservatives and salt. Nothing organic, and I don’t know if that chicken (or the eggs) are free-range or not. If you’re vegetarian (let alone vegan) or have religious dietary restrictions (kosher or halal), you don’t have an awful lot of choice, either. By making your own sandwiches, you can follow any diet you like, and you are in full control as to how much fat, salt, sugar and preservatives go into your lunch. The vegetables you use to make your own lunch are probably also fresher, too.

4. (an extra bonus reason) You get more variety in your diet. With pre-packed sandwiches, you can probably try the whole range within a fortnight… and you discover that most of them taste pretty much the same. But if you make your own lunch, you can vary it up a bit. Why not try blue cheese, avocado and peanut butter? Or grapefruit marmalade and cream cheese? Or banana and peanut butter? Or lettuce, marmite and tomato? Or hardboiled egg, cheese and spinach – with Tabasco sauce? Or sardines, capers, tomato and alfalfa sprouts? The possibilities are only limited by your imagination and your palate… and maybe your budget, as we can’t all have caviar sandwiches.

5 (yet another bonus reason). Cut lunches are an excellent place for parents or lovers to tuck little notes for the person who eats the lunch, which builds stronger relationships. This applies whether the parent or lover made the lunch for the eater or whether the eater made his/her own lunch.