What if I told you that if we had longer lunches students would be more productive during class time? Well, it’s true. Studies from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) show that students should have a minimum twenty-minute lunch. However less than fifty percent of schools in the United States of America follow this recommendation. Experts say that thirty minutes is not enough time to digest food.     

 One student here at Pasco High School says, “it would be great to have longer lunches, because we’re in school for six hours and I feel like we need a longer break.”

It is true because we are in school for six hours with only a thirty-minute break to socialize and eat, then it’s back at it. Although it would be awesome to have a longer lunch, with that longer lunch comes the problem of returning to that work mode, if you will. That feeling like once we’re on pace with our work it’s hard to get back into with that longer lunch. It becomes more time for the students to leave campus and skip their remaining periods, as if it isn’t already bad enough with thirty minutes of lunch.

But with great power comes great responsibility. If we had that longer lunch then some students would take advantage of it and finish up extra work that they could not have finished in Enhancement/Intervention (E/I). To add to this, a copious amount of high school students are antisocial because of this little time to socialize and make new friends. And they cant make new friends if they are shoving, their food down their mouth because there is limited time, it is so unhealthy and can lead to digestive problems. The students need 20 minutes of seated eating says the CDC and USDA this time this does not include walking to the cafeteria, getting the food in the long line of students, finding a seat that leaves them with minimal time to actually get quality nutrition. As well as it can be dangerous because students can choke on their food. 

By law schools must provide enough time to eat and learn so when schools need more minutes for class time lunch is often the first-place schools look to when in need of minutes. The state law says that lunch needs to be a reasonable amount of time for kids to eat their meal and have proper hygiene. There is one small problem reasonable is not justified like the time students have in class and instructional hours.

What a lot of teachers and staff don’t realize is that school puts a lot of mental strain and stress on students, and a longer lunch can help the student’s mental health. In a study by the National Library of Medicine, 60% of students tested that ate rapidly also overate. The fast eaters were also three times more likely to be overweight. The two biggest problems when having a shorter lunch is either not eating enough or overeating,  you must have a full nutritious lunch.

Let’s face the facts here: lunch is the most important meal of the day, and to have such little time to enjoy it is brainless, I say this because if the school board wants students to be academically proficient or even close to it a shorter lunch won’t help, and this is why I think students here at Pasco High should have longer lunches.