Portland · Guide

Lunch outdoors, standing, in the rain, all year

Portland has more than six hundred food carts spread across more than sixty pods. That is a genuinely unusual way for a city to eat lunch, and it has a physical consequence nobody plans for: for a large part of the year, a normal lunch means standing outside in the cold and wet, often hunched under a canopy, holding a container.

Cold makes you smaller

When you are cold your body pulls inward. Shoulders rise, arms come in, your chin drops. That is a completely sensible response to weather and a genuinely bad position to hold for twenty minutes while you eat standing up, five days a week, through a Portland winter.

The people who feel this most are the ones who go straight from a desk to standing hunched in the cold and back to the desk. Your upper back never gets a position that is not some version of forward.

• Stand square rather than braced against the weather. It sounds trivial and it is the whole thing.
• Put the container down when you can. Holding food at chest height for twenty minutes is a small sustained load in exactly the wrong place.
• If there is somewhere to sit, sitting upright beats standing hunched.

Walking there is the useful part

The walk to the pod is doing more for your back than the food is doing against it. It is often the only proper movement break in a desk day. Take the longer route.

The desk on either side of it

Lunch is not the problem in isolation. The pattern is desk, then twenty minutes cold and folded, then desk again. If your afternoon is worse than your morning, look at the middle of the day rather than the chair.

When it is worth talking to somebody

Cold weather stiffness that goes once you warm up is normal. Worth a conversation with a qualified provider: upper back or neck pain that is present first thing in the morning, pain that travels into an arm, numbness or tingling in the fingers, or a headache that seems to start at the base of your skull.

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