10-07-2025
It's time employers started catering properly for a lunch break
A couple of months ago for a magazine feature I visited Fresnoy-le-Grand in France, where they make Le Creuset pots, those incredibly heavy, expensive casserole dishes.
I spent all day at the factory, speaking to various executives and workers, but the thing that really struck me was not the white-hot blast furnace making the cast iron but the lunch. The tour stopped and we all — factory manager, various directors, the photographer and I — traipsed into the company dining room, where we were presented with a chicken tagine (cooked in a Le Creuset of course), couscous, side dishes of vegetables, followed by a cheese board consisting of seven different cheeses, finished off with a Paris-Brest pudding, coffee and chocolates.
Was this all laid on for my benefit, I asked, slightly embarrassed? I was told no: stopping for a hot lunch was just what they did.
It is easy to have an Anglo-Saxon envy for the French insistence on long lunches, longer holidays and love of going on strike, which they somehow manage to enjoy alongside their remarkably high productivity levels. But I do wonder whether France's better GDP-per-worker, which the Office for National Statistics estimates as being between 9 per cent and 28 per cent higher than the UK's, is because of the country's frequent stoppages rather than despite them.
Famously, on the French statute books, workers are banned from eating at their desks, a rule more honoured in the breach than the observance. It derives from an 1894 decree that outlawed lunch at work in an attempt to make workplaces more hygienic by ensuring that workers did not scoff their baguettes and saucisson on the factory floor.
To this day, a minority of workers return home for lunch and certain French roads can be lethal at midday as people speed back for their break. This used to happen in the UK but has almost entirely died out. Last month in this column I mentioned a 1958 survey that suggested that 60 per cent of Britons returned home for lunch. Does anyone still do this?
Robert Spratt, a doughty correspondent to the Times letters pages, says that in the 1950s, as a young banker, he could not eat a sandwich at work because there was no staff room or other place for him to consume a homemade lunch. As a result, he had to cycle the six miles home, eat his midday meal, and cycle six miles back within an hour. Which suggests that he was either a phenomenally quick cyclist or a very rapid eater.
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Either way, it used to be the norm in Britain for workers to take an hour for a trip home, or to the pie shop or Savoy Grill, depending on your budget, and we need to bring this habit back.
The meal itself is not the important aspect, although a cheese board with an oozing brie and delicate Chabichou du Poitou is not to be sniffed at; it is the enforced respite, the shutting of the laptop and stepping away from the Slack, Teams and Zoom.
Estimates vary as to how much time the average British worker spends on lunch but it is not long. One study, undertaken by the catering company Sodexo, put it at a mere 22 minutes; a larger survey, undertaken by the rival caterer Compass in 2023, put it at 33 minutes. More importantly, too many of us are eating lunch al-desko, which is not only a crime against the English language but also a public health disaster.
A study by University of Arizona researchers found that the average computer keyboard has 400 times more bacteria than the average lavatory seat. Admittedly, this is one of those shock facts that journalists adore: if we're being honest, most loo seats are cleaned more regularly than a keyboard.
It is true, however, that too many of us grab a £4 meal deal from the supermarket, rush back to our desk and munch it while either deleting emails or reading LinkedIn posts, because it looks to your boss as though you are working.
Only this week the food producer Gosh! Food published a survey suggesting that a mere 36 per cent of people took a lunch break every day.
A proper breather can lead to greater levels of productivity, according to a large study undertaken by a team led by Zhanna Lyubykh of Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University, Canada. The duration of the break is not the important thing but the quality of it. Scrolling social media, they found, led to exhaustion; going outside in a green space boosted productivity.
Most workers, however, take their lead from their boss, too many of whom either subscribe to Gordon Gekko's mantra that lunch is for wimps or performatively juggle typing and a tuna temaki at lunchtime.
The solution? Mandate a lunch break. Seen Presents is a London events organiser, whose clients include Amazon and Netflix. A few months ago the bosses decided to formally block out 45 minutes in all employees' calendars for lunch with the message: 'Try and get away from your desk and see that sunshine. I know it's hard sometimes to get away, but it's good for you and your brain … even if it's just a quick walk around the block.' Natasha Broady, one of the directors, said that since they started the scheme staff morale had noticeably improved and productivity probably had as well.
If Winston Churchill found time to lunch on sea kale, jugged hare and cherry tart during the Blitz without it diminishing his war effort, surely we can find time for 60 minutes to escape from calls and texts and messages and find solace in a Greggs steak bake or one of those new fancy £12 Pret salads.
In our always-on work culture, lunch is the one time we should be allowed to press the pause button.
