7 January 2026

The indignity of Farmer J

Fast-casual cafés turn lunch into a trip to the metaverse

Photo by Iuliia Pilipeichenko / Getty Images

One of the greatest assaults on human dignity, I have long found, is airport security. For a brief moment you become both a suspected terrorist and cattle. Second only to that dehumanising enterprise is trying to buy lunch at “Farmer J” – a fast-casual corporate spot/place/joint (any one of those contemptible words will do) that has taken over London at an alarming pace.

I visit the Farringdon branch in central London on a Friday at midday to see whether this newly hegemonic chain – with its folksy interiors and ubiquitous dark green window fronts – has earned its popularity. I regularly see queues winding out the door. One colleague raves about the salmon, while another asks with tentative hope if, on my return, I liked the experience. Well, my trip quickly became more of an exercise in confirming prejudices than level-headed journalistic inquiry. I hated it.

And before you ask, no – that is not just because I entered through the wrong door twice, hitting two dead ends in their roped-off queuing system. That might be evidence of some cognitive decline on my part, so not necessarily their fault. Because I also struggled to find the exit. But I would like “J” to tell me exactly why his establishment needs three separate doors for three separate functions. Not to mention an intricate three-step navigational guide through the ordering process, which you will discover once you finally make your way in.

I come away from the counter with some indiscriminately curried chicken, cauliflower (which is cold – despite being displayed under a heat lamp) and broccoli (which is hot – despite being displayed under the same heat lamp as the cauliflower). Among your options is all-the-rage-these-days Gochujang salmon, something called “the butcher’s kofta”, and lime leaf tofu. As a culinary genre, it belongs to that fuck-it-who-cares bland Pangea fusion. I sighed every time I looked down and realised there was more to eat.

Farmer J is a British company but the fast-casual concept is an American import. New Yorkers have for years been eating at Cava, Sweetgreen and Just Salads (which, in an engaging theatrical misdirection, also sells wraps). I wonder if this is just what lunch is now: variable grain, protein and vegetable slurry, served in a cardboard container, consumed at an office desk, and sold in the service of distant venture capital. Everything is the same: a race to achieve chickpea-kale-chicken singularity, one desk lunch at a time.

And it has certainly emerged in London, with arresting intensity. At Salad Kitchen on Leather Lane, round the corner from Farringdon, it tastes a lot like it does at Farmer J, just at a teeth-chatteringly cold temperature. On nearby Holborn, at Tossed, you must order from an iPad. That really does feel like a final middle finger angled directly at the souls of the weary London worker, lined up like drone bees, ready for their bowls full of stuff. It is terribly convenient though.

The accumulative effect of this – the iPads, the three-step ordering systems, the unmistakeable sheen of global capital – is to grant the lunchbreak all the charm and human intimacy of online shopping. Except, somehow you are there. Salad, uploaded to the cloud; a trip to Farmer J, via the metaverse; physical reality, digitalised.

I wouldn’t mind it so much if the Bowl of Stuff Industrial Complex was at least honest with us and itself. To say the food is bad would be to credit the good people at Salad-whatever with aspirations they do not have. This is about imperial real-estate ambition: a bid to become synonymous with the corporate fabric of the city; to make a £15 joke at the expense of lunch.

I leave Farmer J with my mandatory cardboard in hand, after I successfully locate the exit, and look around. Everyone is scurrying back to the office with their bowls of stuff. If that’s what you want, friends, then I have good news for you: there’s always a perfectly good Pret across the road.

[Further reading: For the chop: an elegy to London’s Smithfield meat market]