The fourth period bell rings as students exit their classes for lunch break, rushing to grab, eat, and digest their lunch within thirty minutes. Considering how long students take to reach their preferred lunch spot and retrieve or purchase their lunch, thirty minutes isn’t long. With this in mind, would it be beneficial to students and faculty to extend lunch time?
“[A longer lunch] would be good if people [want to] have more time to relax in between classes,” Maddox Richwine (‘26) said. “It also gives you more time to go get food if you want to because it’s a little stressful with only thirty minutes.”
However, a longer lunch time wouldn’t only give students more time to destress. Longer lunch periods could also boost productivity for academic-oriented students.
“I feel like longer lunches would help me with school because I got my 5th and 6th period after [lunch],”Richwine said. “I usually have tests in them, so I could study [during lunch].”
Implementations that extend lunch period lengths can potentially reduce students’ hunger levels and improve focus and behaviors in the classroom. Additionally, longer lunch periods provide students with opportunities to study and prepare for classes.
Santa Maria used to have an hour-long lunch but changed their schedule to thirty minutes.
“With a longer lunch, we ran some tutoring sessions at lunchtime leading up to AP tests ,” Santa Maria High School teacher Matthew Markstone said. “We would always have kids coming into our rooms and doing extra prep work, and now with the shorter lunch, it just doesn’t happen.”
Furthermore, studies show longer lunch periods reduce trash and food waste (Godoy & Aubrey, 2015). A study from Harvard School of Public Health demonstrates that students with more time to eat lunch had “a 13% decrease in entrée waste, 12% decrease in vegetable waste, and 10% decrease in milk waste” (Cohen, 2015). This is significant as the overall estimated national cost of K-12 lunch food waste is $1.2 billion nationally. Longer seated lunchtime for students could decrease food waste on campus.
“At [Santa Maria High School], we do have a problem with trash on our campus in general, and it has gotten a lot worse with a shorter lunch,” Markstone said.
Longer lunches also lead to healthier choices. Cohen’s research showed that kids with at least 25 minutes of sit-down time eat more veggies.
“I already eat [vegetables], but my friends don’t really,” Evan Williams (‘28) said. “Maybe if lunch was longer people would eat healthier.”
“I normally just eat the school lunch, so it takes a while to grab it, walk over to my friends, and eat,” Williams said. “A lot of the time there’s not enough time to finish all the food unless I eat really quickly.”
Students potentially not having enough time to finish lunch is an issue, as students who lack nutrients tend to be irritable and have difficulty concentrating (USDA 2015).
Longer lunch periods could potentially influence upperclassmen’s eating habits as well.
“With a longer lunch time, maybe instead of getting fast food like McDonalds, people would go to a healthier sandwich shop or hit up a smoothie place or something,” Richwine said.
Lunch time is an essential part of the day, and for many students in the U.S., it’s one-third of their daily caloric intake. With this in mind, the time schools allocate for students to socialize and eat lunch should be carefully considered.
