Workers' lunch hour-India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

Workers taking an hour's break for meal can hardly be seen in any office nowadays. Hectic lifestyles, working longer hours and an increasingly 24/7 lifestyle, have all been blamed for the disappearance of traditional mealtime as people are forced to eat on the go. According to new research, over half of hard-working Brits now spend just 20 minutes to scoff down their lunch each day. Further the study, by the New York Bakery Co, revealed that a fifth of Brits choose to snack five times a day and often skip their evening meal over sitting down at the table for three square meals. They are spending 35 hours less a year on formal meal times than they did a decade ago, with one in 10 admitting that they simply do not have the time to eat breakfast. It is considered that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but Brits allocate a mere 10 minutes or less wolfing it down. The study showed Brits are eating later in the evenings with 16 per cent revealing that they eat their dinner later than 8pm every night. “People snatch breakfast on the run, grabbing a coffee and blueberry muffin. At lunch, it’s often a bagel or a curbside hot dog,” the Daily Mail quoted Christopher Bigsby, Professor in American Studies at University of East Anglia, as saying. Unfortunately our new eating pattern is having an affect on our behaviour late at night, with many of us raiding the fridge late at night to curb the hunger pangs. People from Yorkshire are the most likely to wake up in the middle of the night to satisfy their snack craving with 16 per cent revealing they do this on a regular basis as compared to just five per cent of people from Wales who rarely feel hunger pangs wake them up in the middle of the night. “We suspected that as Brits have started to take on a busier and more hectic lifestyle, but our results prove this is the case with half of Brits sparing just 20 minutes every day for lunch,” said Simon Foster, of Maple Leaf Bakery UK, owners of the New York Bakery Co.

Workers' lunch hour `now a thing of past`