I've noticed something interesting with the access counts for Just Bento. During the hours of 12PM to 3PM (15.00) my time (CET, or Central European Time), the traffic drops quite a bit. This drop is especially noticeable on weekdays. Now, I am just guessing here, but one reason for this may be that it's lunchtime in Europe, and people in Europe generally don't surf the web while they are eating lunch. (A cursory look at traffic patterns by origin seems to confirm this, though of course traffic from North America and Australia/New Zealand also drop during this time.)

So does the same drop occur during lunchtime periods in other time zones? Not at all! As a matter of fact, the busiest times on the site tend to be during the 6PM (18.00) to 1AM (01.00 CET, which covers all the lunchtime periods in North America. 6PM my time is 12 noon on the east coast of the U.S., and so on. The site continues to be busy all through the early morning hours in my time zone, as lunchtime rolls around in Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand, and so on. So I'm imagining a Just Bento reader in the U.S. or Canada or Australia etc. breaking out her (or his) bento or sandwich at her desk, going through their Google Reader feeds, and clicking through to Just Bento and reading about bentos. Am I off the mark?

Just from casually observing how people around me behave, here in Switzerland for instance you almost never see people eating at their desks. A lot of people just go out to eat (most workers here get lunch vouchers to use at restaurants), and even if they bring their own lunch they take it to somewhere away from their desk. But when I worked in New York, unless we specifically went out for lunch for a meeting or something, almost everyone ate at their desks. (I was working at an ad agency, which may have had something to do with that behavior...we were married to our Macs!)

Now, there are plenty of studies that show that eating food while doing something else, such as watching TV, makes people less aware of what they are eating. But when you get caught up in general busyness, it can seem like a waste of time to just eat and not do anything at the same time.

So, that's the poll question: Where do you most often eat your lunch? Please rank the locations according to how often you eat your lunch there. (You don't have to rank the locations you never use.)