Until very recently, it was against the law to eat lunch at your desk in France. The reasoning was straightforward and endured for more than a century: eating in the workplace is hazardous to your health. Granted, in 1894, when this particular section of the
I'm a full-time university instructor with about 430 students per semester, and a part-time illustration business. I've been taking real meal breaks when I'm on campus for about a year. It's mostly a good thing, but it's also very different from the group meals you describe.
On campus, my meal breaks (usually dinner, rather than lunch) are aggressively private. There's always a closed door between me and everyone else, and some sort of relaxing entertainment (like an audiobook, a podcast or a feed full of cat rescue videos) on the table next to me. Grading, emailing and class prep are NOT allowed. Most of the time, it's exactly what I need between my afternoon studios and my evening lectures.
Eating with coworkers exhausts me. This is partly because I am a fat person who gets a lot of scrutiny when I eat. I'm also a diabetic who makes all of my own meals, so I'm the odd one out when we go to a restaurant (if they'll let me eat my own food at all) or order take-out.
Because I have so many students, there's a very good chance that I will bump into at least one person who needs help with a class. I don't like turning people away when they ask for help, especially in large classes, where students are already reluctant to talk with their instructors. If I help them, my dinner break turns into a working dinner. We already know how unhealthy that is.
And of course there are coworkers with poor boundaries. As an Instructor, I am near the bottom of the faculty hierarchy. For folks at other schools, I think I'm in "Lecturer" territory. There are weird power dynamics in play whenever I tell someone "I'm taking a dinner break. Let's talk about this later." I'd rather skip that whenever I can.
Anyway, I love my real dinner breaks. But I see them as chances to rest, rather than opportunities for solidarity.
I’ve been very fortunate to work at organizations — all nonprofits, surprisingly enough — that had a strong tradition of taking lunch away from your desk. At one place, we would all gather at 1 pm and lunch together as a staff; at another, everyone would head out into the city around noon every day either to eat or take a walk or run errands — sometimes alone, sometimes in small groups. It made for a much more pleasant and productive work environment.
In contrast, at my current workplace, everyone eats at their desks — despite the fact that we have a full eat-in kitchen on our floor. When I first started I would sit in the kitchen to eat my sandwich, but every single person who walked by made some sort of snide comment that “it must be nice” to have the time to step away from my desk every day. As I really hate eating at my desk I ended up finding a place outside where I could take my lunch away from the prying eyes of the peanut gallery. It’s sad.
When I worked for Specialized Bikes we had an hour+ for lunch. Most people went on a lunch ride, then ate, then returned to work. But I actually went home, made myself lunch, and took a full hour to decompress from the morning. It helped that I lived about 4 miles from the office. (The convenience of this distance also taught me that I would never commute again.) But because there was such a culture of being away from your desk during the lunch hour--mostly to ride, but also, to just tend to a life well lived--this never felt radical. I should also add that all of Specialized's subsidiaries had a very strong lunch culture. I remember being in Spain where the work day didn't start until 10-11am, then lunch was at 2, then people came back at 4 and worked until 7. Almost every international sub had a 6 hour (or less) workday. It was a dream.
I worked with a colleague, technically my boss but we functioned more like partners, years ago who took about an hour for lunch, shutting the door to the break room and telling the admin (who chose to never take lunch) to send calls to voice mail. I started eating lunch with him by his invite and it totally changed our relationship to more of a mentor/mentee, and then friends after he retired. We sometimes talked about work, but mostly about our kids, random
stuff and what was going on in the world.
Not coincidentally, I think I did my best work there.
I started taking a proper lunch break when I went remote back in March 2020 because there is the physical infrastructure to do so - I can walk away from my desk and go to my kitchen and eat in there. I’m eating similarly to how I did when I worked in an office, but half of the offices I have worked in did not have a designated lunch room. There was a sink and a fridge and a microwave and a coffee pot, but the only place to eat outside of your desk was a conference room that was often booked. When I worked at a place that had a big enough kitchen to actually hold at least half the staff at a time, everyone in the office took a lunch break together away from their desks. For me lunching at my desk has been less of a “must be always working” impetus and more of a “well nothing interesting happened on my phone and I am already sitting at my desk because there is no where else to sit and eat so might as well clean out my inbox” reason. (In terms of suggestions: couldn’t afford to eat out every day, and no convenient parks etc to go to in order to eat in a nice outdoor place.)
How odd you should write this - I was thinking about this very fact today, that you "can't" eat lunch at your desk in France. I'm British and I never really bought into the whole "eat lunch at your desk" thing so when I worked in an office in the UK I made sure that I went out every lunchtime! I've lived in France for 15 years and my partner is a labour inspector (inspecteur du travail) but I actually didn't know about this law until Covid. In fact, it's not so much that you can't eat at your desk but your employer is obliged to provide a place for you to eat, like a canteen or a lunch room. Anyway, I never got told off for eating at my desk because it just didn't occur to me to do that, even though I'm an "anglo-saxonne"! His workplace has a canteen but he actually comes home for lunch and you'll see many French people hopping into cars or leaving the premises on foot to go home to eat at lunch time. It creates a sort of second mini commute. In his case, it means that he easily does 10,000 steps a day with his walks to and from work in the morning, at lunch and in the evening!
I just read the Inside Higher Ed piece you recommended, on the peer-review crisis. Something that wasn't raise was the acceleration of expectations for publication in getting a job, getting tenure, and getting promoted. The idea that a grad student, for example, should have published before getting their PhD is absolute horseshit. It wasn't this way ten or twenty years ago - why are we allowing it to keep getting worse? We need to revise our expectations so that people aren't on the hook in such terrible, pressured situations.
I'm about to start a job at a school where lunches are free for staff, and we eat in the cafeteria with students. I can't wait to be in a situation where I have no choice but to walk away from my desk and interact with people beyond my office. That was a major draw to the position for me, actually: that a gently implied requirement that we come together as a community to eat and take a break.
Jun 19, 2022·edited Jun 19, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
I saw this article in action a few years ago when driving from Frankfurt to Brussels. My wife had insisted that we pass up the German rest area for a Belgian one she’d heard about from a friend. Boy, was she right to make us drive on. We pulled into a parking lot crammed with big rigs and then entered a proper restaurant with checkered tablecloths and a horde of truckers eating broccoli soup, liver and onions, followed by a small slice of freshly made pear tart.
This meal rocked my world and I still try to eat proper food at a proper non work setting.
I just joined the Discord (woo!) and look forward to participating. My lunch routine has been all over the place since I started a new job; most of my colleagues seem to eat at their desks with their doors closed, a practice I'd love to coax them out of.
Go to fucking lunch if you can! You never know when the opportunity may be taken permanently away from you.
A long-covid-like illness has decimated my ability to eat. I eat the same exceptionally restricted two meals, every day, and have for the past 3 years.
It is not an eating disorder, it's a digestion and immune disorder. My body rejects 90% of food.
The tough thing is I am a foodie! I love to cook, for myself and others. I love to eat with other people and connect over food. I love to scheme and dream about creative things to make. It's so precious, culturally, personally, socially, and artistically to be able to just fucking EAT.
Meanwhile, long covid is hitting 1 in 5 people hit with Covid, which seems to eventually develop into the kinds of mast cell and microbiome issues I have.
Go to lunch! Do it for those of us who can't, and for a future-you who may not be able to.
"But I can’t be the only one thinking: all this GDP fetishism, and for what?" Just a big hand-waving yes. For what! For years, but especially now as a person with a team, I block off lunch with a big ole "LUNCH - AWAY FROM COMPUTER" on my calendar. Living far away from lunch "options" has also helped because I do in fact have to *make* it if I am going to eat anything. And now that precious time goes toward eating a sandwich outside with my cats on their harnesses chasing moths. Irreplaceable to my mental health. And appetite.
I took a part-time job a few months ago. If an employee has an eight-hour shift (which I do twice a week for this job), then they “get” a half-hour unpaid lunch (so any eight-hour shift gets 7.5 hours of paid work). I never realized how short a half hour can be until working this job. I leave the building, so between leaving and coming back, I have about ten minutes to bolt down my food. And WHY are lunches unpaid for hourly workers? I am a person who needs to eat.
This is my world. We spend a lot of time convincing others that eating together at lunch is how our community works and is different (a food and agriculture school! It should be!). The slippage into over work and sad lunch is so pernicious.
I'm not working right now so always try and listen to some music when I eat lunch. It really improves things! I should probably do the same with dinner instead of watching Gilmore Girls or Borgen.
I'm a middle school teacher and an introvert. The last thing I want to do with my 30 minute lunch period is socialize in the lunchroom. HOWEVER, I'm also a human being who needs connection, so every day, I eat with another coworker who prefers to avoid the lunchroom. The two of us sit down together, eat, talk about our families and our lives, laugh and share. It's truly one of the best parts of the day. When she's absent, I descend into the sort of quasi-work, sad-desk-salad or mindlessly scroll Twitter.
In regards to a balance between work and not-work, I wish more people instead of being bitter and snippy about teachers having summer vacation would realize that a) you don't want me teaching your kids if I never get a fucking break from them and b) you also deserve to have extended breaks on some sort of regular basis. (Not even getting into the "we don't really get three full months off" and "we're actually unemployed for that time; it's just that our already sub-par pay gets spread out over the 12 months.")
The Case for Lunch
I'm a full-time university instructor with about 430 students per semester, and a part-time illustration business. I've been taking real meal breaks when I'm on campus for about a year. It's mostly a good thing, but it's also very different from the group meals you describe.
On campus, my meal breaks (usually dinner, rather than lunch) are aggressively private. There's always a closed door between me and everyone else, and some sort of relaxing entertainment (like an audiobook, a podcast or a feed full of cat rescue videos) on the table next to me. Grading, emailing and class prep are NOT allowed. Most of the time, it's exactly what I need between my afternoon studios and my evening lectures.
Eating with coworkers exhausts me. This is partly because I am a fat person who gets a lot of scrutiny when I eat. I'm also a diabetic who makes all of my own meals, so I'm the odd one out when we go to a restaurant (if they'll let me eat my own food at all) or order take-out.
Because I have so many students, there's a very good chance that I will bump into at least one person who needs help with a class. I don't like turning people away when they ask for help, especially in large classes, where students are already reluctant to talk with their instructors. If I help them, my dinner break turns into a working dinner. We already know how unhealthy that is.
And of course there are coworkers with poor boundaries. As an Instructor, I am near the bottom of the faculty hierarchy. For folks at other schools, I think I'm in "Lecturer" territory. There are weird power dynamics in play whenever I tell someone "I'm taking a dinner break. Let's talk about this later." I'd rather skip that whenever I can.
Anyway, I love my real dinner breaks. But I see them as chances to rest, rather than opportunities for solidarity.
I’ve been very fortunate to work at organizations — all nonprofits, surprisingly enough — that had a strong tradition of taking lunch away from your desk. At one place, we would all gather at 1 pm and lunch together as a staff; at another, everyone would head out into the city around noon every day either to eat or take a walk or run errands — sometimes alone, sometimes in small groups. It made for a much more pleasant and productive work environment.
In contrast, at my current workplace, everyone eats at their desks — despite the fact that we have a full eat-in kitchen on our floor. When I first started I would sit in the kitchen to eat my sandwich, but every single person who walked by made some sort of snide comment that “it must be nice” to have the time to step away from my desk every day. As I really hate eating at my desk I ended up finding a place outside where I could take my lunch away from the prying eyes of the peanut gallery. It’s sad.
Long live lunch!
When I worked for Specialized Bikes we had an hour+ for lunch. Most people went on a lunch ride, then ate, then returned to work. But I actually went home, made myself lunch, and took a full hour to decompress from the morning. It helped that I lived about 4 miles from the office. (The convenience of this distance also taught me that I would never commute again.) But because there was such a culture of being away from your desk during the lunch hour--mostly to ride, but also, to just tend to a life well lived--this never felt radical. I should also add that all of Specialized's subsidiaries had a very strong lunch culture. I remember being in Spain where the work day didn't start until 10-11am, then lunch was at 2, then people came back at 4 and worked until 7. Almost every international sub had a 6 hour (or less) workday. It was a dream.
I worked with a colleague, technically my boss but we functioned more like partners, years ago who took about an hour for lunch, shutting the door to the break room and telling the admin (who chose to never take lunch) to send calls to voice mail. I started eating lunch with him by his invite and it totally changed our relationship to more of a mentor/mentee, and then friends after he retired. We sometimes talked about work, but mostly about our kids, random
stuff and what was going on in the world.
Not coincidentally, I think I did my best work there.
I started taking a proper lunch break when I went remote back in March 2020 because there is the physical infrastructure to do so - I can walk away from my desk and go to my kitchen and eat in there. I’m eating similarly to how I did when I worked in an office, but half of the offices I have worked in did not have a designated lunch room. There was a sink and a fridge and a microwave and a coffee pot, but the only place to eat outside of your desk was a conference room that was often booked. When I worked at a place that had a big enough kitchen to actually hold at least half the staff at a time, everyone in the office took a lunch break together away from their desks. For me lunching at my desk has been less of a “must be always working” impetus and more of a “well nothing interesting happened on my phone and I am already sitting at my desk because there is no where else to sit and eat so might as well clean out my inbox” reason. (In terms of suggestions: couldn’t afford to eat out every day, and no convenient parks etc to go to in order to eat in a nice outdoor place.)
How odd you should write this - I was thinking about this very fact today, that you "can't" eat lunch at your desk in France. I'm British and I never really bought into the whole "eat lunch at your desk" thing so when I worked in an office in the UK I made sure that I went out every lunchtime! I've lived in France for 15 years and my partner is a labour inspector (inspecteur du travail) but I actually didn't know about this law until Covid. In fact, it's not so much that you can't eat at your desk but your employer is obliged to provide a place for you to eat, like a canteen or a lunch room. Anyway, I never got told off for eating at my desk because it just didn't occur to me to do that, even though I'm an "anglo-saxonne"! His workplace has a canteen but he actually comes home for lunch and you'll see many French people hopping into cars or leaving the premises on foot to go home to eat at lunch time. It creates a sort of second mini commute. In his case, it means that he easily does 10,000 steps a day with his walks to and from work in the morning, at lunch and in the evening!
I just read the Inside Higher Ed piece you recommended, on the peer-review crisis. Something that wasn't raise was the acceleration of expectations for publication in getting a job, getting tenure, and getting promoted. The idea that a grad student, for example, should have published before getting their PhD is absolute horseshit. It wasn't this way ten or twenty years ago - why are we allowing it to keep getting worse? We need to revise our expectations so that people aren't on the hook in such terrible, pressured situations.
I'm about to start a job at a school where lunches are free for staff, and we eat in the cafeteria with students. I can't wait to be in a situation where I have no choice but to walk away from my desk and interact with people beyond my office. That was a major draw to the position for me, actually: that a gently implied requirement that we come together as a community to eat and take a break.
I saw this article in action a few years ago when driving from Frankfurt to Brussels. My wife had insisted that we pass up the German rest area for a Belgian one she’d heard about from a friend. Boy, was she right to make us drive on. We pulled into a parking lot crammed with big rigs and then entered a proper restaurant with checkered tablecloths and a horde of truckers eating broccoli soup, liver and onions, followed by a small slice of freshly made pear tart.
This meal rocked my world and I still try to eat proper food at a proper non work setting.
I just joined the Discord (woo!) and look forward to participating. My lunch routine has been all over the place since I started a new job; most of my colleagues seem to eat at their desks with their doors closed, a practice I'd love to coax them out of.
Go to fucking lunch if you can! You never know when the opportunity may be taken permanently away from you.
A long-covid-like illness has decimated my ability to eat. I eat the same exceptionally restricted two meals, every day, and have for the past 3 years.
It is not an eating disorder, it's a digestion and immune disorder. My body rejects 90% of food.
The tough thing is I am a foodie! I love to cook, for myself and others. I love to eat with other people and connect over food. I love to scheme and dream about creative things to make. It's so precious, culturally, personally, socially, and artistically to be able to just fucking EAT.
Meanwhile, long covid is hitting 1 in 5 people hit with Covid, which seems to eventually develop into the kinds of mast cell and microbiome issues I have.
Go to lunch! Do it for those of us who can't, and for a future-you who may not be able to.
"But I can’t be the only one thinking: all this GDP fetishism, and for what?" Just a big hand-waving yes. For what! For years, but especially now as a person with a team, I block off lunch with a big ole "LUNCH - AWAY FROM COMPUTER" on my calendar. Living far away from lunch "options" has also helped because I do in fact have to *make* it if I am going to eat anything. And now that precious time goes toward eating a sandwich outside with my cats on their harnesses chasing moths. Irreplaceable to my mental health. And appetite.
I took a part-time job a few months ago. If an employee has an eight-hour shift (which I do twice a week for this job), then they “get” a half-hour unpaid lunch (so any eight-hour shift gets 7.5 hours of paid work). I never realized how short a half hour can be until working this job. I leave the building, so between leaving and coming back, I have about ten minutes to bolt down my food. And WHY are lunches unpaid for hourly workers? I am a person who needs to eat.
This is my world. We spend a lot of time convincing others that eating together at lunch is how our community works and is different (a food and agriculture school! It should be!). The slippage into over work and sad lunch is so pernicious.
I'm not working right now so always try and listen to some music when I eat lunch. It really improves things! I should probably do the same with dinner instead of watching Gilmore Girls or Borgen.
I'm a middle school teacher and an introvert. The last thing I want to do with my 30 minute lunch period is socialize in the lunchroom. HOWEVER, I'm also a human being who needs connection, so every day, I eat with another coworker who prefers to avoid the lunchroom. The two of us sit down together, eat, talk about our families and our lives, laugh and share. It's truly one of the best parts of the day. When she's absent, I descend into the sort of quasi-work, sad-desk-salad or mindlessly scroll Twitter.
In regards to a balance between work and not-work, I wish more people instead of being bitter and snippy about teachers having summer vacation would realize that a) you don't want me teaching your kids if I never get a fucking break from them and b) you also deserve to have extended breaks on some sort of regular basis. (Not even getting into the "we don't really get three full months off" and "we're actually unemployed for that time; it's just that our already sub-par pay gets spread out over the 12 months.")