Don’t write the obituary of the lunch hour just yet

Rewatching Modern Times the other day, I realised it’s only a matter of time before something like the Billows Feeding Machine gets shilled on TikTok Shop.
The dystopic invention, which automates the act of eating, bringing food right to your mouth so you never have to stop working, even for a moment, is pitched to factory bosses in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film lampooning the industrialised world as a means to “eliminate the lunch hour, increase your production, and decrease your overhead”.
To be clear, such a machine, as janky as it is absurd (it starts malfunctioning almost as soon as Chaplin’s character straps it on, force-feeding him corn on the cob), remains purely fictional. But can’t you imagine it existing today? Even worse, be honest: might you even use it?
Nearly a century ago, Chaplin saw where hypercapitalism was taking us. Today, roughly half of full-time US employees skip lunch outright at least once a week, according to a recent national survey conducted by the food-tech company ezCater, which forecasted that by 2030, “skipped lunches might just become the norm”.
But though the Guardian, for one, already reported on “the tragic disappearance of the American lunch hour”, we shouldn’t print the obituary prematurely. From the very start, the lunch hour has been contested, and its embattled history reminds us why we need to fight for its future now more than ever.
When I reached out to the creator of the online etymology dictionary Etymonline for help pinpointing the origin of the phrase “lunch hour”, the earliest reference they surfaced came from an account published in an 1836 Sydney Monitor.
The “lunch-hour” in question belonged to the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Education reformer Henry Carmichael referenced waiting on Bentham “at his lunch-hour — at which time he was always accessible”.
Bentham, who belonged to Britain’s upper class, would not have taken a meal during his “lunch-hour”. Rather it was a period of the day devoted to taking a break from work, where he “often encountered friends and held brief conversations” as he would take his “circumgyration” around his extensive garden.
It’s a stark contrast to the lunch hour that we’d recognise today, which emerged not out of leisure but out of haste.
As Margaret Visser explained in The Rituals of Dinner, a history of how we eat our meals, “ordinary working people” in pre-industrial England ate two meals: one in the morning and one in the early evening. Between that time, they “contended themselves as they had done for centuries with a midday snack”.
This diet couldn’t sustain factory workers as they began commuting further from home and putting in more hours on the job. And so, in the 19th century, a new midday meal break arose.
Time was money, and factory owners squeezed as many hours of profit from workers as they could. A contemporary account included in Sue Zemka’s Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society showed the incremental ways bosses pressured labourers:
“Formerly an hour was allowed for dinner; but one great manufacturer, pressed by his engagements, wished his work-people to return five minutes sooner. This abridgment was promptly adopted at other mills. Five minutes led to ten… Time was thus saved; more worker was done; and the manufactured article could thus be offered at less price.”
The garment industry was the worst offender. One 7-year-old garment factory worker testified that he worked 14 hours a day, during which he was given just one 30-minute break for lunch that he “had to eat right there in the factory, often having to remain standing”.
These inhumane conditions gave rise to campaigns to restrict the length of the working day. The 10-hour movement, as it was first called (followed by a 9-hour movement, then an 8-hour movement), didn’t just fight for workers to get off the clock earlier but also, notably, for them to get real meal breaks.
On the path to the Factory Act of 1844 — Britain’s first health and safety act, which restricted the working hours of women and young people and added regulations to protect them from dangerous workplace practices and environments — an 1833 bill defined mealtime as more than just a moment for nutrition. It was “an interval of cessation from work for the purpose of rest and refreshment”.
Factory workers, tethered to their machinery, perhaps best understood just how precious a real break was, and because of that, it’s no surprise that they made the most of what they had, coming together to find a respite in words.
But workers who had the means to take real lunches did not place the same value on that time.
In the US, especially, the Protestant work ethic put a premium on productivity from the start. Lunch was often treated not as an act of respite but of utilitarian nourishment.
Back in 1794, an English traveller in the United States observed in his journal that within a half hour of his 2 o’clock meal, fellow tavern diners had all “quitted the table to go to their several occupations and employments except the Frenchmen and ourselves; for the Americans know the value of time too well to waste it at the table”. This was among the gentler remarks made by foreign travellers to the new nation, according to Jennifer Jensen Wallach’s research in How America Eats: A Social History of US Food and Culture. The French, renowned for their eating culture, for instance, had a blunter take on early American dining. Opined one commentator in 1804: “They swallow almost without chewing.”
By the end of the 19th century, however, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche observed that America’s culture of “breathless haste in working” had infected Europe, too. “One thinks with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market,” he wrote in his 1882 book The Gay Science.
Speaking about this passage, Mark Alfano, a professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, explained that Nietzsche recognized how effectively the American cult of productivity had started eroding many people’s ability to simply “keep still” and engage in “long reflection”. It was a warning of where capitalist manifest destiny would go, if left unchecked.
But Alfano pointed out Nietzsche had a “very interesting follow-up point” about how humans can resist optimisation: Prioritise joy.
“If sociability and the arts still offer any delight, it is the kind of delight that overworked slaves make for themselves. How frugal our educated and uneducated have become concerning ‘joy’! How they are becoming increasingly suspicious of all joy. More and more, work gets all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a ‘need to recuperate’ and is starting to be ashamed of oneself.”
Where better to start than with the lunch hour?
Factory women at the turn of the 20th century, without time to eat a real lunch nor a breakroom to take it in, exemplified this by creating a break for themselves by reading paperback novels together on factory floors.
We can find our own versions of this today. Because the history of the lunch hour is one of resistance but also imagination — offering sustenance for our stomachs and ourselves. © Zócalo Public Square
Jackie Mansky is a senior editor at Zócalo Public Square. This was written for Zócalo Public Square.