Let me start by saying a “20-minute lunch” is not a real thing. Millions of US students experience that so-called 20-minute lunch daily but calling their experience “lunch” is like calling the January 6th incursion into the capitol building “confusion over opening time.” A lunch of 20 minutes — the CDC calls for this — can be expected to be less than 20 minutes. Yes, many schools allocate a full half-hour, but books must get to lockers, students must get across schools, many people have to go to the bathroom all at once, and then everyone has to navigate that long, snaky line.

See Why Teens Are So Miserable (& How We Can Help) (zdoggmd.com). Zubin Damania is a hospitalist, known on YouTube as ZDoggMD. Aside from his negativity on masks in schools, he nails a number of issues squarely on the head in this video, addressing rising levels of teen sadness, anxiety, and mental health. Our children are becoming more alone, though often more alone with a phone, he observes. Where are the in-person social connections?

Eduhonesty: I’d like to flag something. That 20-minute mastication period does NOT qualify as an in-person social opportunity. Once recess has disappeared, our middle school and high school students lose their venues for social interaction, unless they seize that opportunity in class — as a regrettable but understandable number do. In elementary schools, those recess times keep shrinking too.

Having shared my lunch period with students, I know that bolting down a piece of pizza and and a mug of coffee doesn’t leave time for any real conversation. I still have to throw away my green beans,* after all, and probably take something to the main office. And my kids still have to throw away their milk cartons and green beans, and then go to lockers to retrieve afternoon class materials, fitting in a bathroom break along the way. Not all kids can get out of that bathroom in two minutes, especially girls.

I am writing this post to suggest we share with parents and others a truth escaping many people: Lunch sounds like a break, a chance to talk with friends. However, depending on the school and even the location of a kid’s locker or number of bathroom stalls, that “break” may be PURE FICTION. Like a daily planning period that keeps getting pre-empted for meetings, only some of which result in planning, lunch for many of America’s students does not offer the oasis of friendship its name implies.

To liberally paraphrase an old quote from the 1988 Dan Quayle vice-presidential debate: I knew lunch. Lunch was a friend of mine. Reader, these are not lunches. 

Hugs, to my readers. A small blog post that’s a drop of water in a larger, toxic ocean that is sweeping our kids to lonely places, lost in a crowd, often with phones to isolate them further.

*Feel free to look up the sodium target 2 in schools — (USDA’s Final Rule on Milk, Whole Grains, and Sodium in School Meals – EveryCRSReport.com) I don’t want my post to spiral off-topic so I will keep this short. You can get away with barely — or not — salting beans when they are fresh, but after beans have cooked nonstop for hours, only butter or at least salt will rescue them.