Free Lunch - The Free Lunch Fiend

The Free Lunch Fiend

The nearly indigent "free-lunch fiend" was a recognized social type. An 1872 New York Times story about "loafers and free-lunch men" who "toil not, neither do they spin, yet they 'get along,'" visiting saloons, trying to bum drinks from strangers; "should this inexplicable lunch-fiend not happen to be called to drink, he devours whatever he can, and, while the bartender is occupied, tries to escape unnoticed."

The custom was well-developed in San Francisco. An 1886 story on the fading of the days of '49 in San Francisco calls "The free lunch fiend the only landmark of the past." It asks "How do all these idle people live" and asserts "It is the free lunch system that keeps them alive. Take away that peculiarly California institution and they would all starve." Rudyard Kipling, writing in 1891, noted how he

came upon a barroom full of bad Salon pictures in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the "free lunch" I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts.

A 1919 novel compared the experience to a war zone by saying "the shells and shrapnels was flyin round and over our heads thicker than hungry bums around a free lunch counter."