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01/10/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 01/11/2025 09:59

How COVID Reshaped the Traditional Office Lunch Break

How COVID Reshaped the Traditional Office Lunch Break

Remote work has decimated restaurants' lunch rush, another evolution in the ever-changing history of the workplace lunch break, BU's Megan Elias says. Photo via iStock/Moyo Studio

Food & Dining

How COVID Reshaped the Traditional Office Lunch Break

BU's Megan Elias says remote work has clobbered restaurant lunches while promoting home meals

January 10, 2025
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The line at the workplace lunch haunt isn't as long as it used to be. Last year, spending nationally for weekday restaurant lunches fell 3.3 percent from the pre-pandemic year of 2019, according to the business tech platform Square. Boston logged three times that percentage drop, as people shifted their eating out to weekends instead.

But while restaurant rushes slackened, remote work has spurred DIY lunches at home, says Megan Elias, associate professor of the practice and director of the Gastronomy Program at Metropolitan College, whose books include Lunch: A History. Making the midday meal-and making time to eat it-marks a reclamation of the lunch break, a source of employer-employee tension since the dawn of industrialization, Elias says.

"My very first job, I was out of college and I was working in a law firm as a secretary," she recalls. "I had heard of the lunch hour. So I thought I had an hour. At some point, somebody was like, 'You've been gone an awful long time.' I'm like, 'Yeah, the lunch hour.' 'No no no, your contract says half an hour.'"

The pandemic made other changes in how we lunch at work. Corporate cafeterias are being elbowed aside by meal delivery services, which allow businesses to align food orders with the number of in-office workers on any given day. Elias studies such aspects of food consumption to ask, "What do you see around that, what kind of power dynamics, what kind of social system?" The workplace lunch break, she says, has "been fluid since the mid-19th century. So I can't see why it would stop. I can't imagine that it's not going to keep changing." We asked Elias about the state of the workplace lunch. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q&A

With Megan Elias

BU Today: Has the work lunch break gone the way of the dinosaurs?

Elias: Time off for lunch has always been contested time, and the way it is now, I don't think, is the way it's going to be in the future. It changes because of changing circumstances.

The lunch break that we know-a set period of time, maybe half an hour, an hour if you're lucky, whether you go outside or sit with coworkers and chat-came with industrialization, with the need of employers to control employees' time, [in] the late 19th century. Workers came in with a bell in the morning, they broke for lunch with a bell, they came back from lunch with a bell, and the day ended with a bell. Before industrialization, workers controlled the pace of the day. Stopping to eat and drink together was central to that. You're all working on one thing together; everybody's bringing in the crops together. Maybe one person wants to break early, but everybody else is saying, no, let's push on to the next row before we stop. It's a collective decision, and the lunch lasts as long as it needs to last.

That concept is really cut out with industrialization. The worker loses control of their time. We know we're industrializing when we don't get to say when we come to the factory and when we can leave. So labor really had to fight for the break. That changed over the past 50 years, as there was an increasing focus on just keep working, a work ethic that becomes intensive. As Gordon Gekko says [in the Oliver Stone film Wall Street], "Lunch is for wimps." You've got to keep going, or you're proving that you're weak. It's a reaction to the postwar economic boom: we have to work harder to keep in place, or even to get ahead. Of course, many people ignore that culture; if you're working the assembly line, you are definitely going to break when the bell goes off for break, you're going to take that time for yourself. But in upper-middle-class office jobs, the culture of skipping lunch becomes dominant.

BU Today: Did recent events-working from home, inflation in food prices-turbocharge that trend?

Elias: I think it's the opposite. It turbocharged the trend of reclaiming lunch. There's first a backlash against skipping lunch at the turn of the 21st century, with the culture of self-care. Then the pandemic really gives people their lunch back, because they can't go into their office. There they are, in their home; many more people are making lunches than had ever done before, and they realize that that-the time to cook-is time for yourself. It's you connecting with your wishes, your skills or lack thereof-what can I make?-and your space.

I think that made a big difference when people came back into the workplace. They're less likely to be going out to lunch, because they know how to provide for themselves. They know it's cheaper. They know it can be interesting. I haven't seen this yet, but it can also be competitive: What did you bring for lunch? Knowing that, for lunch places, labor costs are higher because of some great gains for labor over the period of the pandemic, and that is going to drive up the price of lunches.

BU Today: So are we talking about the slow return of the lunch break?

Elias: Yeah, I think there's a lot going on. Restaurants that serve a lunch rush are not doing well. Many people are not working five days a week in the office, so [restaurants] don't have that sustained audience. [But] there's the phenomenon of the desk lunch. We have these fabulous silicone covers for your keyboard so you don't get crumbs and sodas in them. Some day, there'll be cupholders, I'm sure.

BU Today: If we're eating at our desks, does that mean the lunch break has gone away?

Elias: We're still eating. Maybe we're not stopping [work], but we're making room in our workday for eating alongside everything else. In big cities, we do see people having lunch outside. You will see throughout Boston on a nice day, folks sitting with friends. That's something you're not going to see in an office park, because the space doesn't exist.

BU Today: What does the status of the lunch break mean about the current status between employers and employees? Are employers going to slowly lose some control as the lunch break comes back?

Elias: The lunch break is part of the larger story of the pandemic helping workers understand what they want. It broke the workday; you may be doing childcare at the same time you're doing your job, so that's really a return to preindustrial lifestyles, for women especially. All of us who work in office-y jobs were able to figure out what we like. We can stop for whatever food we feel like making; it doesn't depend on what's in the neighborhood of our office, we can plan our lunch ahead of time, we can sit with our family sometimes and eat lunch, we could start making bread in the morning and have a fresh sandwich in the afternoon. We can weave our food through our workday.

People are discovering that that's something pleasant and self-fulfilling. It's part of why it's hard for employers to get employees back into offices, if that's where they want them. People have become much more connected to their kitchens as workspaces.

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  • Rich Barlow

    Senior Writer

    Rich Barlow is a senior writer at BU Today and Bostonia magazine. Perhaps the only native of Trenton, N.J., who will volunteer his birthplace without police interrogation, he graduated from Dartmouth College, spent 20 years as a small-town newspaper reporter, and is a former Boston Globe religion columnist, book reviewer, and occasional op-ed contributor. Profile

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