Is eating the same meal daily boring or smart?

Does eating the same meal every day make you boring or savvy?

This argument matters, because I like variety: Every decade or so, I switch my lunch.

I ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches every day in my 20s. Ramen in my 30s and early 40s. Salads since then. Variety!

Back to the question: Does choosing the same food every day – for breakfast, lunch or dinner – make you boring? Or just low-maintenance?

Your answer depends on your need for variety. Food variety, like politics, is a dividing line for humanity. Some of us can eat the same meal, day after day. Year after year. Decade after decade. The same meal is comforting. It's predictable. It's good enough.

Others find it appalling. We don't want the same lunch twice in the same week, let alone every day for a month, year, decade, century. Give us something different!

A reporter for The Atlantic recently dived into the topic of what drives people who eat the same meal every day. He cited one study that showed that 17 percent of British people had eaten the same lunch daily for two years and another that reported that one-third of British people ate the same lunch daily.

Apparently, British researchers are more interested in this topic than Americans, who are more interested in choosing our favorite Kardashian.

Those British statistics reveal that a lot more people eat the same meal every day than you think. It's not just the obsessive-compulsive among us. It's not only motivational speakers or college football coaches who sleep in their offices or middle-aged former newspaper editors who are too lazy to change.

It's often regular people.

The big question: What drives some of us to forego adventure and eat the same meal over and over and over?

The article in The Atlantic cited predictability and simplified decision-making. Maybe we have to make too many other decisions. Maybe we hate grocery shopping or choosing which restaurant to visit. Maybe we need to avoid certain types of food.

Maybe we're boring. Maybe we're predictable.

One of the people interviewed volunteered that she has a "work uniform" she devised to simplify that decision, something with which I might identify (or maybe not. Only Mrs. Brad and my co-workers know).

This much we know: In an era where people identify themselves as "foodies" and have opinion on spices and menus and types of food that others didn't know existed, an article on people who eat the same thing day after day makes most readers feel better about themselves. They either learn they aren't weird or they feel superior to the control freaks who eat the same meal every day.

Not so fast if you're in the second group. The author of The Atlantic article pointed out the obvious: Most people around the world who eat the same meal every day do so out of necessity, rather than choice. They don't have the option to go to several fast-food restaurants or to have whatever meal they want. They eat what they grow. Or catch. Or beg.

For this salad-for-every-lunch practitioner, the most important observation came from a food-studies scholar at New York University. “Newness or difference from the norm (in eating meals) is a very urban, almost postmodern, quest," he said. "It is recent. It is class-based.”

So there.

Your desire for different foods is a class-based, upper-crust entitlement. My daily salad – joked about by co-workers, amusing to Mrs. Brad, profitable for my grocery store – is really a hat-tip to tradition.

Or I'm boring. Both may be true.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.