February 27, 2018Many public school students on average only get about 30 minutes or less to eat their lunch. Because of that about 1/4 of students lunches will not get eaten and it will get thrown away. School lunches should be longer for many reasons, but the main reasons that school lunches should be longer is because students would be able to have healthier meals, students who have a longer lunch do better in school and because students would have more time to socialize with each other. Longer lunches in school would have many benefits for students.
Healthier meals
Picture by Pexels
In 2010 a law was passed so that students would be able to have healthier lunch choices but how can students eat healthier if they don’t have the time to. According to the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, students who have over 30 minutes for lunch tend to have healthier meals because it takes more time to eat an apple then it would applesauce, so if students were able to have longer lunches then they would be able to eat a lot more fruits and vegetables and get the nutrition that they otherwise would not usually have during the school day. The law that was passed in 2010 was seen as a good thing because students would be able to eat healthier but according to the article Eating and lifestyles at school, thought that law was passed with good intentions students still aren’t actually eating better, students are consuming less calories than they should be at lunch because the foods are healthier and students have less than 20 minutes to actually eat all their lunch therefore they don’t get all of the calories. Even if schools made lunch about 10 minutes longer then students would be able to eat more of their meal and have a healthier meal.
Better grades
Students who have longer lunches are shown to have better grades. According to the Los Angeles Times, when students are able to eat all or most all of their lunch and have time to socialize with their friends they will do better in school because having that break time reduces the amount of stress that students have, and if students are struggling they would be able to use there longer lunch period to get help from their teachers on the homework or test. In many countries like France, students are allowed to go out to eat and have around 2 hours for their lunch break, because they believe that it is important to take a break and sit down with friends or family and enjoy your meal instead of being rushed through it. In France when you eat and have your lunch break it gives the students time to do some of their homework or work on their homework that would be due later in the day. Schools are focused around grades so if a longer lunch could help students get better grades in school why wouldn’t they want to make lunches longer so that it would benefit many people .
More social time
Picture by Pexels
By the time students walk to the lunchroom wait in line to get there lunch, sit down and actually start to eat they have twenty minutes or less. Students are also told not to talk in class, so the only real free time to talk to others is lunch. But with about twenty minutes of lunch, student´s all most have no time to either talk or eat their lunch. Having longer lunches would allow students to be able to talk to their friends and to eat most or all of their lunches. By making schools have longer lunches students would get more of a chance to socialize with each other then about the twenty minutes of lunch and the few minutes of passing time there is in a day.
Most adult lunch breaks in the U.S range from about thirty minutes to about an hour. According to article, How Much Time do Americans Spend Eating ¨The average adult in the U.S gets anywhere from 30 minutes to 60 minutes to eat their lunch¨. Teachers start telling us from the time where young that they are getting us ready for the ¨real world¨, if they want us to get us ready for the real world why don’t they prepare us and give students the same amount of time to eat as an adult would get on a normal work day. If schools had longer lunches then students wouldn’t be as stressed because they would have more time to talk with their friends.
Benefits of longer lunches
If schools would just shorten classes by a couple of minutes and add those minutes onto our lunch time then lunches could be around 15 minutes longer. By increasing the time that students have to eat then students would be able to have more of a well balanced lunch and have time to eat most of their food. Longer lunches would also help increase students grades because with the extra time students would be able to get help from their teachers it they needed or finish their homework for other classes if they needed. Also it would give students more time to socialize and that would help bring their stress levels down because when students won’t be so stressed when they are not focusing on school all of the time. Having longer lunches would have many more benefits for students and their education.
Featured image by Pexels
Prev Post
Anonymous
Nice blog, but you made a mistake by including that Los Angeles Times article as a source. The study it discusses isn’t about high schoolers at all, it only features elementary to middle grade students! And what the study found actually proves you wrong: kids who had a 20 minute lunch were a lot better off when their time for lunch was increased to 30 minutes. Our lunch is ALREADY a half hour long, which is what the study recommends as the ideal timespan, just enough time to enjoy all the benefits you mentioned in your post. I think the question should not be “what our lunch time can do for us” but rather “what we can do for our lunch time.” There’s a way to fit healthy eating, social time, and homework into 30 minutes, it’s just a matter of efficiency.
Christian
While a 15 minute longer lunch would be more beneficial to students it your proposed plan would be implemented it would require either school to start and hour earlier (6:30) or end an hour later (3:10) this would create immediate problems with busing as buses usually go from their highschool routes to their middle school routes however with the increased lunch time all students, Middle school, elementary and High School would ride on the same bus further increasing the traffic congestion that is present at release times. and If schools began an hour earlier there would most likely be an increase in total number of people absent or tardy in first hour classes, therefore negating any positive effects achieved from the increased lunch time. Students who drive would also be at greater risk as they would be at a greater risk of falling asleep behind the wheel, resulting in an increase of accidents.
addie
I agree with your statement, although maybe next time back it up with some real statistics.
StudentBlogger
I really like and agree with your post. As ERHS only gets 15-20 minutes (they say it’s 30 but they release us early), I can relate to this on a personal level. The only thing I have to say about negatives is you had some grammar mistakes, and sme wording was hard to read and understand. Overall, I really enjoyed this. Thank you for sharing this with us.
anonymous
While we are talking about wording you should know that you missed a letter in there.