School lunch breaks in France can be two hours (2012) | Hacker News Reader

School lunch breaks in France can be two hours (2012)

karenlebillon.com

113 pointstaubek224 comments

I spent part of my childhood in France/Switzerland, and one thing I'll never forget is a scene of street construction in a French town. It's about 11:30am, and three guys all get done with the excavator and jackhammers. One guy goes and grabs something long from the bed of a truck, another heads to the cab and reaches for a brightly colored bundle, and the third guy grabs some chairs from the other side.

Right in the middle of the cordoned-off construction zone, the first guy sets up a folding table, the second guy neatly places a tablecloth on top along with a baguette and bottle of wine and some cheese etc., and the third guy brings up the chairs. These guys sat down for a nice meal for 90 minutes, at least, before getting back to work.

I think my American parents thought, "Wow, how in the hell does anything ever get built in this country?" while my thought was mostly, "that seems really nice, they look so relaxed!"

There’s something to be said for a good solid break.

In the US, we’d have one guy who never stops using the jackhammer, two overseeing, one holding a “workers ahead” sign, and a cop playing with his phone.

It took the better part of a year for a small ~3000 sqft single story building to be built next to my (American) residence. Dudes showed up every weekday around 8am and left around 5pm, but they all seemed to be standing around doing nothing half of the times I passed by.

I wonder how much of that standing around is say the drywall guy standing around waiting for pipes or wiring work to be done so they could do drywall work.

Well the drywall person shouldn't be there on that day if things aren't ready for their work to be done.

I mean, I'm all for people being allowed to work at a comfortable pace, spurts of activity in between breaks or a constant medium level of activity, whatever works for that individual.

But damn do I see construction as a particularly lazy industry a lot of the time; especially after moving to the UK, they used to build things so well and so quickly here and now look: nobody wants new build houses because of the shitty construction, crossrail took HOW long and HOW much to build?

Construction ends up looking lazy because they're locked in combat with Amdahl's law. You've got a complex system of interlocking task dependencies, with tasks requiring a variety of other tasks to reach varying levels of completeness before you can start on various other tasks, which rely on specialized labor and various materials provided by various third parties.

It's hard to get good estimates of how long any individual task will take, but you don't want to be in a situation where work could be getting done, but isn't because the necessary workers aren't there, so it's more efficient to pay for workers to be present and ready to begin as soon as their unblocked, versus having to wait for those workers to show up once their blockers are cleared.

I somehow doubt that’s the case when all the guys are idle (for months there was no structure at all and I could see everything).

Cops shouldn't be allowed to carry phones while on duty.

I'm no fan of cops but this is so hilariously petty I can't believe it's a serious opinion. Why stop at cops, doctors, nurses, and firefighters shouldn't have phones either!

I think part of reason people feel this way about cops in particular sometimes is that a lot of their job is to go around monitoring things. It is hard to detect if they are actually working hard or not. Crimes are rare and noisy. If a doctor spends all day playing on their phone, the patients will notice. If a cop does—it was just a low crime day, maybe.

Also the general public has more opinions about the behavior of governments employees.

I dunno how to actually feel about this, from a “is it good” point of view. But I can see why people feel this way at least.

Cops need to be ready for shit to go down at any moment. They should be fully aware of their surroundings at all times. Firefighters, and those other professions you mentioned, when they're working, don't have the luxury of looking at their phones.

If you're a cop and you're on duty in a nyc subway station, your eyes should be on the people around you, not your screen.

My wife and I are both doctors; she does not carry her phone into her clinic rooms unless she's on call. I'm an anesthesiologist, so I have to be immediately available while I'm at work or on call. I always apologize to patients if I have to do more than glance at a text/call to determine if it's right-now important or can wait.

that officer is off duty, just supposed to be "present"...

Indeed! I work for a Swiss manufacturer of high voltage equipment. The best projects are in Romand, where they know how to enjoy life.

A couple of beers at 11:30 in the workshop, before lunch, and some wine and snacks on Fridays to celebrate the achievements that week(dug a hole? Wine! Pulled cables? Wine!)

It seems to have come to an end.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/07/france-allows-em...

But I doubt it's followed or at least I'd bet many ignore it.

My French relatives love to eat and sit down for at least two hours. There's even a word for the after dinner feeling where you chat with friends, but alas je ne sais quoi.

> It seems to have come to an end.

It really doesn't.

This article is about a 100 years old law, who said alcohol is not allowed while at work, unless it's beer, cidre or poiré (alcohol from apple and pear respectively), and essentially a relic of when those were considered food and not alcohol, and we were giving wine to kids at school lunch.

Some employer thought their workers drinking WHILE WORKING was not ok, and they used the law to say wine is not banned, and it went to the courts.

You're free to drink whatever at lunch time, as long as you don't show up drunk, this is about drinking DURING WORK HOURS.

Really not sure how you could misunderstand that case so bad you qualify it as "It seems to have come to an end."

> Wine to kids at school lunch. Never heard that one. My father's friends in boarding schools in the 1960s would have a glass of wine or apple wine (cidre) on sunday, but that was as wild as it got. But maybe it was a regional thing.

INA (french video archive) of the news report in 1956 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_Ez2RMjwuA

> En 1956, le gouvernement s'empare de la question de l'alcool dans les cantines scolaires. Pour la première fois, une mesure significative est adoptée. Désormais, aucun enfant de moins de 14 ans n'est autorisé à boire du vin à table

To add to this, my father started (France, in the 1990s) allowing my brothers and sisters to drink alcohol from our 12th anniversary on, some beer or wine. He'd stave curiosity, monitor and teach about the effects and there wouldn't be much in the house anyway. No one batted an eye. Same for the cigarette. You want to try? Here, this is the poor people's stuff (awful awful cheap tobacco...) and now let me tell you about how much it costs every week and what we can't afford because I can't stop, and now let's talk compound interest and cancer and teeth, and... there was no mystery or edginess in all this. The price of modern life, he would call it.

> cidre or poiré (alcohol from apple and pear respectively)

Cider and perry, in Britain at least. Generally very close to the French versions, although perhaps a little less sweet.

> My French relatives love to eat and sit down for at least two hours. There's even a word for the after dinner feeling where you chat with friends, but alas je ne sais quoi.

Are you thinking about the Spanish word sobremesa? Never heard such a similar word in French.

Maybe 'les dents du fond qui baignent' which as far as French expressions go, is pretty... poetic

There is a cultural change and people drink much less wine at work during lunch breaks. But it's still served in a lot of work cafeterias. Maybe work has become mless wine-compatible?

But long lunch breaks are still there. My boss sometimes outright despises people in our company who take sandwiches "as if they couldn't spare 45 minutes to eat". Here, a 2-hour-long lunch break is a lot, but nothing that would get you strange looks if it doesn't happen everyday. Of course, a good lot of employees (30% I'd say) are following the French law-mandated 151,67 hours of work per month (a little more for us because of special dispositions), so it doesn't really apply for them and they "only" get one hour of lunch break.

"Cadres" (theoretically managers, but practically what's in your contract) have more autonomy and work hours are not recorded.

So many offices are closed 12-14. But don't go to the bank at 11:45: they'll be packing up and saying they're leaving for lunch. That break is really 11:30-14:30. Took me a few tries to get my bank stuff done when I just moved there. I'm used to being able to do such chores at lunch hour, but no, don't count on it in France. People are having lunch :)

A neat illustration of French union power.

Nope. Lunch time isn't part of work time so I don't see why the employer would even care.

They care a lot about the duration of breaks. Ask Jeff Bezos where his drivers pee.

Here I'm thinking bread and cheese and wine had to be the most disgusting malnourishing lunch possible for outside labor.

How about some steak, chicken, hell a few meatballs. Protein.

The wine is a bit much for a mid day meal at work, operating heavy machinery on alcohol isn't the best idea but the cheese and bread are a lovely mid day meal. Cheese is very digestible and high in protein so it's going to sit less heavy than a piece of meat. Bread is carbs and helps with energy during the day. Maybe throw in some high quality French butter and you've got a delicious meal.

I used to be a laborer. Carbs were more important than protein.

Cheese (being dairy), has a lot of protein.

You and I have very different definitions of a lot of protein.

One ounce of steak contains 7 grams of protein. One ounce of cheese however… contains 7 grams of protein.

Steak is also a high fat source of protein just like cheese, but steak has about 5g fat per 7g protein, cheese has about 9g fat per 7g protein.

Cheddar cheese is about 25% protein by mass. Chicken is about 27%.

100 calories of BLSL chicken has 18g protein.

100 calories of cheddar has 6g of protein.

>Here I'm thinking...

>How about some...

How about to each their own?

Isn't there too much calories in steak and chicken? Better to have just 2 slices of bread with 2 pieces of cheese and tea.

> … It's about 11:30am, and three guys all get done with the excavator and jackhammers …

> … and bottle of wine …

So operating heavy equipment after consuming alcohol?

i guarantee you that at most american construction sites, at least one of the equipment operators has had a beer with their lunch.

I worked in landscaping a few summers during college. About a third of the crew was drunk or high most of the day. Driving small pickup trucks, operating commercial mowers. It was definitely eye-opening for me.

Warehouses, Kitchens, Construction. A lot of the blue collar jobs in the US are done while people are high on something. I think weed is more popular than alcohol though.

I had always heard, but never corroborated, that the typical 750ml volume of a bottle of wine was chosen because it was an appropriate amount for two people to consume at lunch.

Is it true? I have no idea! But those guys would have emphatically agreed, I think.

What kind of lunch ? A sunday lunch maybe, if you down half a bottle of wine per day during the week you have an alcohol problem. At work it's certainly not appropriate, especially not for construction work

That's the point: the French have your sunday lunch every day.

Someone told me that he doubts anyone could get anything built in Germany without beer, but that was decades ago, so maybe it's changed. This someone and I were talking about construction workers.

As in the immortal words of Lucille Bluth: "wine only turns into alcohol when you let it sit".

I think the "appropriate" amount of alcohol to consume before operating construction equipment is actually lower than 750ml... lower by about 750ml...

Here in France it certainly was nothing that would get you labelled an alcoholic 40 years ago. But it was rather an upper limit.

That makes sense really. It's about 5 glasses. So for two people if it's a 2 hour lunch break even with a very low tolerance at the end of lunch your BAC would be very close to 0.00. The average 150lb male metabolizes 1 glass of wine per 45-60 minutes.

I have no idea, but the alcohol content of different wines varies by quite a bit, and probably also changed over time?

Yes. AFAIK "Table wine" (and table beer in northern regions) was pretty light. Just enough alcohol to kill germs.

Whoever told you that was an alcoholic.

One random site[0] on the internet says the 750ml[1] size began to be standardized on in the early 18th century. That's something like 250-300 years ago.

It could be entirely true that it was considered an appropriate amount of wine for two people to share over lunch at that time. Certainly other norms have changed since then.

[0] https://disndis.com/blogs/blog/why-wine-bottles-are-750-ml

[1] Give or take a margin of error, decreasing over time, one suspects.

> It could be entirely true that it was considered an appropriate amount of wine for two people to share over lunch at that time.

Alcohol content in wine went up significantly, as well.

This was normal everywhere not so long ago

Woo Woo It's the sound of Le Gendarmerie.

Seriously though, and while it's falling rapidly, France has a very high rate of what other countries might label functional alcoholism. A very high, daily alcohol intake, by way of habit, but not hidden, not a binge.

If a glass or two is your background level, lunch isn't going to significantly impair you.

> Woo Woo It's the sound of Le Gendarmerie.

Woop Woop that's the sound of la brute?

Air France pilots used to get wine with their in-flight meals...

I guess you can take it easy when you got rich being one of the most brutal colonial powers (which continues to tax its former colonies to this day: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/08/03/macron-france-cfa-franc...).

When I was in high school (graduated almost 20 years ago now), our lunch period had 30 minutes for lunch, and that included the time it took to cross campus to eat (from one side of campus to the other took 10 minutes to walk if you could cut through the fields, but if it were raining and the campus flooded, you were stuck on the sidewalks and it would take 15-20 minutes to cross campus).

If you were "lucky" you got either first or third lunch, because that butted up against the 10 minute inter-period "travel" time, giving you 40 minutes for you lunch/play.

But each lunch had around 1000 students competing for the lunch line, and there were many days where the lunch line did not complete before the lunch bell rang, and lunch was over.

And if you did not make it to your class on time

Jesus, dude, where was this? I graduated in 1999 from a school with nearly 3,000 students and it didn't even take me five minutes to walk to the school from my house, let alone to cross the campus. It was an average of maybe 40 seconds from classroom to the lunch area, depending on which class you had immediately before. If it was band, you lucked out and were right next to the cafeteria, though we also had separate outdoor food sellers and I never personally ate at the cafeteria and there weren't too many lines because there were so many options. Once senior year came and we could leave campus, there were three different walk-up Mexican lunch counters within four blocks of the school and it didn't take 10 minutes to get to one of those, either, and we were across the street from a grocery store. I lucked out senior year because my day ended with three consecutive periods of art and the art building was the one right next to the gate to the parking lot.

Credit California for at least that one thing. The open air campuses with hacienda style layouts were really easy to get around. Contrary to European imaginations in which all of the US is Frisco, TX, even in a Los Angeles suburb I could also walk pretty much everywhere as a kid and the weather was kind enough most of the time to even make it pleasant.

Alvin High School in Alvin, Texas.

Small town of only 30k people, but the school district kept absorbing other districts. Some kids (me included) had 2-3 hour bus rides to school. Some days if I missed the bus, I would have to walk, but the walk was only 30-45 minutes depending on if I stopped at a friends house or not.

That is one way to save on county food expenses?

Our lunches were not free. We paid $2.50 for lunch, and that came with an apple, choice of entre (microwaved hamburger on wheat bun, microwaved pizza, or microwaved chicken nuggets). Our lunches probably cost around $0.50 in food, and our cafeteria workers were paid minimum wage, so in the 8 hours, the 5 cafeteria workers all together made $210. Assuming 30% of kids took their lunches (I doubt it was this many), and assuming $2 in food profit per child. That was around $4k/day in profit. It all went to our football stadium. I'm from Texas.

If you think you can make and sell meals for $2.50 and make $2.00 in profit on every meal, you should go into the restaurant business.

This was 20 years ago.

So, adjusting for inflation, that meal would be around $8.75 today. And with todays food prices, and today's higher minimum wage, it is still profitable.

NO ONE would pay $9 for this meal today, but we were paying $2.50 for it 2 decades ago.

A microwave hamburger patty is $0.90, a bun is $0.18, a gala apple is $0.65 - these are grocery store prices, not bulk orders from suppliers. But that comes out to $1.73 vs $1.75 ($0.50 adjusted for 20 years of inflation).

EDIT: As others have stated my inflation calculation is off by about 2x, but the point still stands, I can remake the same meal today at grocery store prices for less than the school meal cost 20 years ago when they were buying for 2000-3000 meals per day. There was definitely a profit being made on those meals. Along with all the other fees we were required to pay to attend our public school.

$2.50 in 2004 is about $4.11 today. You'd have to go back to 1981 to have $2.50 be more than $8 in 2024.

As someone pointed out the inflation over the last 20 years wasn't 300%+.

But if you believe that you can sell any meal for 80% profit you should definitely open a restaurant.

That sounds particularly crappy even for a US school lunch. But I don't think the numbers are right.

Even back then 50 cents a lunch for food is not a real number. Also, reduced and free lunches generally accounted for ~40% of students, and getting reimbursed for that from the federal program required pretty tight bookkeeping.

In the UK in 2005:

> Jamie's School Dinners is a four-episode documentary series that was broadcast on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom from 23 February to 16 March 2005. The series was recorded from Spring to Winter of 2004 and featured British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver attempting to improve the quality and nutritional value of school dinners at Kidbrooke School in the Royal Borough of Greenwich.

> Oliver had his work cut out for him: firstly, the daily budget for school dinners was a mere 37 pence per child.

That's currently 47¢. Wages and other costs are different, but it's in the ballpark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie%27s_School_Dinners

In the US, the federal reimbursements starts at $0.37 cents for paid lunches and goes up to $6.37 for certain free lunches. That's in addition to additional grants and aid that is available at the state and district level:

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2022-07-26/pdf/2022-1...

Maybe things are worse in the UK or food is that much cheaper - but I suspect Jamie excluding certain funding sources for the sake of drama is more likely.

It was a cheaper part of the country, and local funding differs — Rotherham was the lowest.

However, no-one disputed the figures, and the government very quickly set 50p as a recommended minimum.

This is a longer article from a year after the show aired: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2006/jun/25/schools.uk

I grew up in a very impoverished, but very proud area. Kids usually get their first job at 14 to help pay for their school food and fees (even our public school had fees for basically every elective you took - and you were required to take multiple electives per year... not very elective, if you ask me).

There was a number I heard years ago (after I graduated, and went back to work for the school district), that high-90s% of the students met the reduced/free lunch, but only 10% took it. My mom and dad paid for all 4 of use to have our lunch at full price even though my mom and dad together brought home under $30k for most of my childhood.

Even now, the school district actually offers free lunches to ALL students regardless of income levels, and again, very few families have signed up for it.

It's beyond dysfunctional that this happens in the richest country in the world. Money is a means and not an end, if you cannot ensure a decent childhood for your country's children (while less wealthy nations manage much better), what is even the point of so much economic growth?

I know we are sharing anecdata from walking up the hills both ways but I'll add my own. I went to the Peoria Illinois school district. You can look it up - it was one of the poorest, worst performing, most underprivileged school districts in the state (outside of south Chicago and East St. Louis). I was on the reduced lunch program (40 cents a meal). But even we had a pretty boring affair of canned peaches and vegetables with lima beans with our Salisbury steak.

Also, the application for reduced lunch was included with the registration for the school so uptake was pretty high. At the time the district was legally compelled to feed kids whether they paid or not, so they were incentivized to maximize the reimbursement from the federal government to defray the costs.

If we didn't have money, our "free lunch" was a peanut butter sandwich. The problem is (at least in elementary and junior high) you probably weren't sure if your parents even paid the school for lunches. So you would get to the end of the line, select your entre, apple, and milk, and then put in your pin, and the lunch lady will take your tray back, and hand you a peanut butter sandwich (no jelly).

Not sure what the free lunch is now days, but probably not peanut related.

I went to school in a fairly affluent area a bit more than 20 years ago. Our choices for lunch were nacho and cheese, grilled cheese sandwich and frozen pizza.

Same, Fairfax County school lunches were gross in the 80s and 90s.

Meanwhile, a friend worked at Sidwell Friends for a few years and she said the food there was better than most restaurant offerings. It's good to be rich and powerful.

Are pizzas and hamburgers healthy food though?

Not to be celebrated then I see.

At my previous workplace in France before going full remote I also had a 2-hour lunch break between 12H and 14H. It was great I would bike to a food place, grab some to go, and head to the nearby park and be by myself listening to an audio book or whatever. I think these hours are common in many places: 9H-12H, 14H-18H. 35H/week.

On the other hand all my friends that have two hours lunch breaks hate it and would much rather go home an hour earlier.

I don't have a set time and if my colleagues aren't there or if I work from home I will eat in front of the computer in 5 min and finish earlier.

I had an internship at CreateSpace after it was purchased by Amazon, paid hourly with time cards!

My normal lunch procedure was to clock out, order a pizza from a nearby pizza place, drive out to pick it up, bring it back to my cubicle, clock in, and eat it at my desk. This also works well with sandwiches.†

I later learned that I was legally required to take at least 30 minutes of lunch break, and I was horrified. Thankfully there was no enforcement. My mind boggles at the idea that workers need legal "protections" requiring them to spend less time at their home.

Do your work from 9h to 16h, and enjoy a bigger part of your life.

† It was also pretty common for everyone to go out together to a big group lunch. In such cases, the time taken for lunch is whatever it ends up being. But I was free to spend as little time as I wanted on my own individual lunch, if there wasn't a group lunch.

> clock in, and eat it at my desk

But then you're eating during your worktime. I'm pretty sure your "check out, order, take it, bring it back, eat it" routine takes more than 30 minutes total time. Your employer might be OK with that, and I don't know if that's common in the US, but in France, that's illegal (many people still do it, though). You're not supposed to take your lunch break while working (or else it wouldn't be a "break" in the first place).

> order a pizza from a nearby pizza place, drive out to pick it up, bring it back to my cubicle

In all likelihood, this plus eating took almost 30 minutes anyway.

Capital has vastly more leverage than any individual laborer. If lunchbreaks weren't mandated, I can assure you most companies would develop cultures where stopping to eat was considered "slacking".

I just skip lunch and leave {lunchtime} early.

Why the downvotes? This is a real point of view. I eventually got so fed up hearing about Game of Thrones and trite opinions about Trump's stupidity that I developed a habit of completely skipping lunch, telling my colleagues I was into keto. They respected it, God bless them.

I think it might be a culture thing but at where I work no one actually uses the break room to eat lunch, everyone eats at their desk. With that said a lot of people do so by skipping the lunch break time

French here. I think 2 hours are too long for lunch break.

It happens that it suits me well, because I can go to school get my kids, have lunch with them and spend time with them, and then bring them back to school (the joy of working at home !).

But for kids having their 2 parents working, it's a very long period of time that can be "waste" every day. Of course socialization is important and, well, that's one of the only thing you can do during those breaks.

Of course some school have clubs or activities that can be done in those hours, but not enough to please everyone.

And this come with a price: hours spent in school !

In my teens' school, nearly every day starts at 8h. And some big days can end near 18h (6PM) and have 8 hours of class ! Which is, in my opinion, far too much.

We spent 2 years in Ireland, where school ended around 14 and 15 (2-3PM), kids had more time to play, do their homework, or do some sport.

Here, my daughter is doing boxing, and it's between 19h and 20h (7-8PM), on a day she started school at 8H, finished at 16h30 (4:30PM), do her homeworks, get the bus to go to the boxing club, and then eat at 20h30 when she comes back.

(Very) Long day !

(edit: typos)

> But for kids having their 2 parents working, it's a very long period of time that can be "waste" every day.

For children, it’s time they have to spend (mostly) outside and with other children (or participating in some club or another). It’s just as important for their development as time with their parents, which they would statistically spend looking at a phone or a tv anyway.

And in Spain people take siesta. And it makes sense, our body needs rest to digest food. That's why we get food coma. Every one not just children should do this.

It’s possible to avoid the post lunch productivity lull by changing what you eat for lunch.

I’ve found that avoiding carbs and sugary items in particular prevents me from feeling a significant performance drop.

This is a myth, the vast majority of working people in Spain do not take siesta on workdays. On weekends sure.

In the south of Spain, and still a minority.

I'm from the north and I know no one here who takes siesta.

Has it always been limited to the south? Or is the practice dying out because business has become more international and people in other countries find it inconvenient for Spain to be offline for two hours in the middle of the day?

You might have a long lunch break, where people go home, eat and come back, making the end of the work day pretty late. But siesta is easy to understand as a southern thing when one notices summer temperatures, and imagines physical labor outside, or a world with no AC. Trying to get anything done at 1:30 PM in, say, Jaen sounds unpleasant. Santander, Oviedo or Coruña are not going to face the same problem.

Spanish siesta's are still just 2-3 hours long. In traditional Indian cultures, people would often work between 6am and 11am and then from 5pm to 9pm, because middle of the day was too hot to do any kind of physical work.

So, I'm definitely going for weather as the reason for the tradition and not any timezone shift. And that also means that office work and air conditioning should reduce this practice over time.

My grandparents (born around the 30s) never described it as a common thing here in the north. I can't vouch for previous periods, but siesta mostly makes sense for outdoors jobs in hot climates (where it's actually a great idea), so I would assume it was never common in the north as the climate is much cooler.

In the south, it's also becoming less common with the change from rural to urban living and from outdoors to office jobs.

I'm from Castilla y León (mid west) and the only people I know doing this are people who have to work at unusual times that wake up at 3-5 in the morning.

People with normal working hours don't take siesta.

Barcelona definitely takes siesta.

They have a long lunch break, yes (like France). But that's not a siesta. As the other poster said, that's really a Southern Spain thing.

It's not a even Southern thing for most people working office jobs and many other common jobs.

The city is "sleepy" around that time, true, and many stores close around that time and open again later.

But I only know a handful of people who actually take naps here in the afternoon. Sometimes yeah, but if you work in a typical office/startup, you can probably count the people who take a nap after lunch on one hand.

Most people working office jobs or otherwise common jobs do not.

We also get two hours in Algeria and la siesta is very common (generally known with its french name "la sieste"). I always took a siesta and I still take it to this day. It helps immensely with productivity. Giving up to a little nap after lunch gives a very refreshing and energising restart for the rest of the day.

Do you mind me asking what time you start and finish work/school?

8am to 5pm.

There is a pause from 12pm to 2pm.

Like many Mediterranean cultures, the people like to appreciate family/friends time and food and they always make sure to make those a priority. In other terms, not rich, but chill laid off people.

Overwork culture have no place and society doesn't encourage that in general. In my opinion, for two reasons 1) it's not a competitive society as in China or India, as there is enough resources for everyone. 2) Hard work is not properly rewarded as in the USA/EU, as the country suffers from corruption and it has failed to develop a modern meritocratic economy, so far.

I read years ago that having a decent breakfast almost completely removes the blood sugar drop that happens after lunch.

It makes sense. Digesting lunch takes a lot of energy from the body. But if you’ve had a good breakfast, you’ll have plenty of energy available from breakfast to keep your brain active. And you can eat less for lunch, too.

You should really beware of referring to these things as absolutes. Everyone is different and there are a wide range of physiologies out there.

Personally, the bigger breakfast I have, the faster and more hungry I get around lunch. If I eat a big breakfast I’ll be ravenous by lunch. The only negative symptoms I experience after lunch happen if I eat a huge lunch.

How much energy it takes to digest depends on the food and the amount, not whether it's lunch or not, no?

If you get food coma because your body is lacking energy to digest lunch, you'll just get food coma after breakfast then, because you'll be lacking energy to digest that.

Speaking of Spain, how much of this is (partly?) because of how messed up time is there:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Spain

It's in the same time zone, CET/UTC+1, as Germany (which is east of 0˚) even though Spain is west of 0˚.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Spain#Criticism_of_the...

(See also France, which is mostly centred on 0˚, so probably 'should' be in UTC+0, but is in UTC+1—presumably to also be in sync with Germany.)

> presumably to also be in sync with Germany

Yes, it was changed by Germany while they were occupying France during World War 2.

Most people are happy with it now though, and during the recent talks about whether to keep summer time or not in Europe, it appeared the opinion in France was mostly to stay on summer time year-round, so UTC+2. Which means more darkness in the mornings during winter, but keeping long evenings in summer and improving a bit the short evenings of winter.

> Speaking of Spain, how much of this is (partly?) because of how messed up time is there

None of it, obviously. It's an adaptation to the weather. The weather doesn't change if you give different labels to different parts of the day.

> Postprandial somnolence, commonly known as “food coma”, is a normal state of drowsiness or lethargy following a meal. It occurs when you consume foods with a high glycaemic index (GI) - https://www.healthhub.sg/live-healthy/your-medical-questions...

"Food coma" is from carbs/sugar. :)

Edit: to satisfy my friendly HN editors. :)

I ate nothing but steaks for a few days (with a bit of butter) and was surprised to find that I did not get tired after a meal, nor hungry again for much longer.

This has been game changing (low carb, not steaks only) for those drowsy afternoons at work. More importantly, I go carb-free 24 hours before I drive any long distance. It makes it so much easier to drive safely for a long distance.

> […] nor hungry again for much longer.

See "satiety index":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_satiety

* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7498104/

Article: Postprandial somnolence, commonly known as “food coma”, is a normal state of drowsiness

You: "Food coma" is from carbs/sugar. It's not normal :)

Why altering meaning by selectively cutting away words? Quote makes perfect sense to me and what I know about nutrition and digestion (not an expert/pro but way above average human)

> "Food coma" is from carbs/sugar.

Some foods give me (then+now) something indistinguishable from a food coma. Wheat is a big one. I'm fine after eating wheat-free carbs.

article you linked to: "...is a normal state of drowsiness"

you: "It's not normal"

pick one.

Hey, I'm just trying to help here. I don't think anyone wants to be feeling comatose after a meal. Reduce the sugar and you'll feel good!

Speak for yourself; having a big meal followed by a nap is a deeply pleasant experience!

It is normal if you consume hi GI food. But consuming high GI food, that is not (or at least shouldn't be) normal.

over the years I have read arguments from both sides. It is not healthy to sleep after food! It is healthy to sleep after food.

I just tried it myself.

And it did help a lot to sleep after food. Limiting in take of sugar/carbs does help. However, personally going on diet like this does NOT suite me. I rather eat the food I want to eat and rest a bit, than watch what I need to eat.

If you are getting food coma, you should balance your meals across the day.

We aren't lions eating once every few days.

Yes, this is the way. In every company I've worked, lunch break has been 1:30 long - between 12 and 13:30. It's also a "no meetings" timeslot.

Children usually do not take siesta. Most adults that work can't take it too.

As a kid, I had one hour and a half in total in two breaks. Children need to play and exercise. Without it children are hyperactive between 4 walls.

This is very much a geographically specific thing. At further latitudes I can assure you we wouldn't want to waste our previous daylight by sleeping then away!

In China even tech workers take a post lunch nap.

I was a lab engineer at a uni once. One day I saw an exchange student with his head against the desk motionless. I rushed to him and shaked him on the shoulder becouse I thought he had fainted ...

The issue specific to the US is time and class sizes. For time, US teachers will only spend 6~7 hours of their day with kiddos. So using up to two hours of that for lunch eats into a huge chunk of the short day (some of which is already more recess!).

And for class size, our schools are huge! Our gradeschool cafeteria sits hundreds of kids, but it's already not big enough for even a third of the school population. We just don't even have enough room or staff for long lunches.

But more addressed at the blogger: I think it's okay that different cultures have different rhythms. Our grade school let kids take the whole break if they wanted to to eat, but an entire room full of kids cooped up inside after a meal instead of getting outside to play would be a disaster.

> And for class size, our schools are huge!

That's not a sole US thing. We have schools of hundreds to in the thousand here as well. Then again they build new buildings if the school grows too big (usually, not always).

Usually the kids used go home for lunch and it was an hour (easily done if you live withing 15min walking from the school). These days you also have schools with shorter lunches and shorter schooldays probably due to more parents both working (kids stay at school then). Lunches are staggered in that case, to not have everyone inside/outside all at once.

> For time, US teachers will only spend 6~7 hours of their day with kiddos. So using up to two hours of that for lunch eats into a huge chunk of the short day (some of which is already more recess!).

By what norm is this a short day? Here in the Netherlands, standard elementary school hours are 8:30-15:00, minus about 1 to 1.5 hours of lunch+breaks, with Wednesday only 8:30-12:30. So on average barely 5hr/day. Anecdotally, schools days in other European countries (DE, FR, UK) are not much longer.

I think elementary is 7:45-14:15(2:15pm) with some outside recess time and lunch included. Most likely the have a sports/gym class too. They also have half days on most Wednesday. This is specific to my county in the US.

And elementary students in the Netherlands would usually go home for the lunch break, as most schools are walking distance from home. (At least, when I was that age...)

I don't know what I'd do if I had kids in the US. The education system here is so toxic. It's like a factory designed to churn out little automatons. Like everyone's purpose in life is to become a cog in a business wheel. "We're preparing you for a life of work."

Art, play, love, nature? Waste of time. Personal finances, cooking, repairs, wayfinding? Useless. We need you to learn advanced maths by hand, for that job you'll have at McDonald's where you need to handle advanced algebra. We need you to learn this highly curated view of history that excludes most of the important events in world history. Philosophy? You'll have to go to an expensive college for that. Psychology? Why should you have an insight into relationships, the human mind, emotional intelligence? It's not like that would come in handy at some point.

If I ran a school, the curriculum would consist mostly of teaching people to curate their inner and outer life towards their own goals and interests. The purpose and benefit of intelligence as a tool to use too improve their own life, and the lives of others. The benefits of benefiting society and our loved ones. The benefits of love. The things nobody should learn by accident.

Here in Belgium it's a minimum of 50 minutes by law but schools usually make it longer at their discretion and resources. Wednesday afternoon there is no class of course, kids are free to use the study halls or go home.

50 minutes for lunch or a 50 minute break in the middle of the day? My daughter gets a 55 minute break in the middle of the day, but only 15 minutes of that is for actual lunch, after that they're 'forced' outside.

That may be if the school is constrained for the launch hall e.g. primary or middle schoolers need to have lunch around the same time as high schoolers, they’d have to create a way that they all get time in the food hall. In the school next door it’s 25min in + 25 min out

Depending on the province though, kids might have little more than a lunchbox with bread slices with butter and ham, which doesn't seem very enjoyable to me (I'm French, with kids in Belgium).

That's probably a cultural thing. Being French, raised next to the German border, married to a Belgian, I must say that our tradition of cooking twice a day (even in the evening, when time is more limited) is quite French. I work in Luxembourg and most German and Belgian people I know will eat a "cooked" meal once a day, and eat bread with something for the other meal. It's very frequent to see them bring a "tartine" for lunch, or the opposite. My wife works in a German company where people could come all over from the headquarters in Austria and bring bread and ham for lunch. Meanwhile the French go eating in restaurants nearly every day even if they know they will cook something elaborated in the evening. My dad, 100% pure French, always needs to cook something, and finish the meal with some mandatory cheese.

German kids get cooked lunch in school, at least in German schools I have seen.

That’s up to the parents? Or children, if they make their own bread. You can get a whole lot more creative with bread than sliced ham.

That's not up to the parents, I can't given them a box with some kind of rougail, or a galette-saucisse or even just green peas with carrots. They don't have a microwave.

It has to be cold and eaten with the hands, and "not too special", anything other than sliced bread with some kind of meat or spread inside is explicitly frowned upon.

I think it is region or school system specific? Here in Go! Flanders kids get served warm food by the school and they’re also welcome to bring their own lunch if they want to.

From what we found, no public school (Go! or gemeente) in Antwerp does that, brooddoos in all of them.

All schools in West Flanders do provide lunch though, and at least some in East Flanders too (obviously we only looked up the areas that matter to us and we didn't conduct an exhaustive study though). So we just concluded that it depends on the province.

At the very least it does not depend on the school system or the region since it varies within Flanders and within the Go! system.

>Now that we’re back in Vancouver, my daughter’s lunch period is one hour long, including 10 minutes to eat. Yep, 10 minutes

absolutely ridiculous. Are kids supposed to just wolf their food down? As an adult I have more time to eat than this.

France has retained a food and dining culture that is luckily still quite distinct from the work-dominated hectic culture in most other places and I'd say it's one reason why obesity rates and other health markers are much better in the country.

>France has retained a food and dining culture that is luckily still quite distinct from the work-dominated hectic culture in most other places and I'd say it's one reason why obesity rates and other health markers are much better in the country.

Most of the south of Europe is the same. Business interests and temporarily-embarrassed-CEOs are somewhat successfully pushing to abolish this culture in favor of the prison-lunch culture. I hope they ultimately fail, but...

What are the other 50minutes of lunch?

Recess?

We US adults seem really clueless about kids' need for unstructured time. I clearly remember feeling better after (therefore learning better) after my 2-3 play times. Lunch/play was 75 min, recess was 15 and there was playground time while the buses rolled in.

My grade school kids (mid90s-early10s) had maybe 20min of play after eating and no recess. After school time was was more of the same - because they had >5x (actual) the homework that I did.

It's a high resource approach to learning; in hindsight, I find no benefit in it. It may be one of the reasons they're disinterested in having their own kids.

Big pharma dosent sell recess but they will sure sell you something to "fix" your ten year old boys "problem" of not wanting to sit with his hands folded attentively listening to someone for eight hours straight every day.

> Big pharma dosent sell recess but they will sure sell you something to "fix" your ten year old

I had 10x the play time that my kids had; stims would have hugely helped me.

FF to today and it's Little Pharma that saves my bacon.

Big LEO, on the other hand, is working overtime to ruin that. You can measure a DEA success by how many thousands of lives are degraded and ruined thru their pointless overreach.

I'm currently taking class for the EMT, and it is _brutal_ to sit through lectures for just 4 hours. That's even with a 10 minute break every hour. For a subject I'm intensely interested in.

Lectures are scientifically proven by educators to be the worst method of learning, yet our schools do it anyway.

I'd honestly assume conspiracy if all the teachers I know didn't just shrug and say "who cares, it's what everyone expects, and it's easy, so..."

I love this topic. For most of the people here, raised in Anglo-Saxon culture, the idea of having a long lunch break is probably shocking as the expected notion is that the lunch break should only cover the time needed to eat.

In many countries like France or Spain, the notion of lunch also entails the other aspect of eating: digestion as the act of getting fed doesn't stop once the food ends in your stomach. It still needs to be digested.

For school kids, it's also an additional time to exercise their muscles by moving around after spending hours sitting down (which we all know now it's unhealthy).

While ten minutes seems like too little, my elementary school lunch was 20-30 minutes and all my memories of it were that I had an abundance of time. They had to force us to stay at lunch longer as the teachers needed more time to eat before going outside to oversee recess.

10 minutes for a child size lunch isn't a short time for the average child. But some kids are fussier eaters. The meals are portion controlled, so kids aren't loading up to avoid going back for seconds.

I assume this includes recess

Recess followed lunch, and if you finished lunch early you could go out early. I want to say they mandated fifteen minutes at lunch, with fifty minutes combined between the two, but my memories of decades ago aren't that good.

My distant decades mirror yours and I just recalled we also had playground time before class. At least 10 min. Maybe while waiting for buses to roll in.

That generation of adults seemed to understand that kids need low/no-adult play time.

90's Caribbean Island.

Primary school

Day starts at 8:30am. Break at 10:00am for 30 minutes. Lunch at 12:00pm for 60 minutes. Day ends at 3:00pm.

Secondary school

Days starts at 7:45am. Break at 10:20am for 20 minutes. Lunch at 12:15pm for 30 minutes. Day ends at 1:45pm.

TIL Primary school schedule in the Netherlands is the same as a 90’ caribbean island.

Might not be a coincidence.

Makes me want to move to a 90’s carribean island.

I grew up in the 90s in Marseille, in the very south of France. At school we had 2 hours lunch break and it was great to have so much time to play outside and all, but now that I think of it: it was in Marseille, it was virtually always sunny and warm, I really don't know how it was for kids in other part of France where it rains and/or it's cold quite often.

What I remember from that time too is that at the commercial center of my neighborhood the lunch break was four hours, from 12h to 16h. In summer it was because it was too hot to really do anything during these hours anyway, but it was also the case in the winter and that has always puzzled me, even as a child.

When I was in school lunchbreak was 10 minutes, in the classroom of the last finished subject, from 12:15 to 12:25.

Just curious, where did you go to school that would allow this?

The Netherlands, the one of the main high schools on an island called Goeree-Overflakkee, Zuid-Holland.

Don't know where the parent is from, but that sounds exactly like I had it in Norway.

I find it super droll that (168 comments in), no person has mentioned how it would be impossible to profit from their midday meal without even the time to properly taste it.

As they said in the era of our ancestors: « de gustibus non est disputandum ».

May as well learn to eat quickly. In hospitals, a 30-minute lunch break is standard. That's not 30 minutes to eat; it's 30 minutes to leave your post, get food if you didn't bring it, eat it, and be back at your post.

The food is not worth tasting anyway, usually.

My wife has gone deep on the issue of adequate lunch time in our community, working with the school, local, and state officials and PTA to try to improve this. If you’re interested in learning more she’s compiled a lot of (U.S. centric) research resources here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-LfGAhkmiy_sZWGCMDyus59X...

Highlights for me:

-lots of inertia, but it’s mainly logistical rather than ideological

-change can garner bipartisan support

-we spend quite a lot of money to get fresh fruit & veg in front of school kids and then don’t give them enough time to eat it

I think it's not just about the long break, but also this mean you end the school day at a more reasonable time. I think school would end at 3PM.. when all normal people are still at work. I remember my school had some afterschool playground area where we're run around and kill time till our parents could arrive. Having the same break during the day would have probably been nicer mentally (and I'm guessing the teachers would move lesson planning and grading to that extra hour after lunch)

Here in Finland the school finishes in the early afternoon, but we kinda trust the children to play outdoors, or walk back home when they've had enough.

Our child, seven, only really received a mobile phone this year because he's walking to school and back by himself as is common here. But he'll phone to say "I'm going home [alone]", "I'm going to play with friend X", or "I'm bringing friend X home with me".

(The children start school at 7, before then there is pre-school, and before that daycare. Around 7 the kids start making their own way to school and back - sometimes walking, sometimes cycling, and sometimes taking a bus/tram.)

You couldn't go home on your own? I was doing that since first grade. Selecting accommodation location to match that was quite important, schools would take local kids as priority. Remote folks took a bus on their own. Learning to cross busy roads from very young age.

I think we go somehow more retarded as society and got properly scared with pedophiles and kidnappings (maybe compensating subconsciously for lack of time dedicated to kids). The worst thing is, this helicopter parenting seriously harms kids development and resiliency.

It was the early 2000s in San Francisco. I started going back home on my own in middle school and the other parents where slightly horrified. Some of it is paranoia, some of it is that public spaces feel less .. friendly? ... with more and more mentally ill people in public. It's mostly safe, but it feels not great.. I grew up in the Castro and I definitely had a few incidents of old men following me on public transit - but nothing too serious or where I actually was afraid for my safety. I think that's just something you can shrug off and a normal part of life - but in the modern climate that's "stranger danger" and the pedophiles are gunna kidnap you

Afaik, high schools in France end pretty late. They get long break, but they dont get free afternoon.

I find that I only really feel fully rested after lunch if I get 2-2.5 hours. So, I wish this was normal. When I was doing a coding bootcamp I was doing the most hard mental work of my life. I coded/was in class about 12 hours a day. I took 2.5 hour lunch breaks. It was the only possible way for me to operate on that level. I think if it was acceptable for me to work 8:30-12 and then 3-6:30 i would probably get way more work done.

I grew in France. During the first hour we ate, and after that we played soccer. Or vice versa.

We also didn't have school on Wednesdays, although Saturdays were half days.

Some of the fondest memories of my childhood are in those 2 hour lunch breaks we had in school. It seemed like an eternity. Southern Europe.

If you think this is good, keep in mind that in France children as young as 10 (basically after finishing junior school) can start at 8 and finish at 6 or even 7 (rarely), after which they will easily have an hour of homework to do every day.

The French school schedule is absolutely not an example to follow.

> If you think this is good, keep in mind that in France children as young as 10 (basically after finishing junior school) can start at 8 and finish at 6 or even 7 (rarely), after which they will easily have an hour of homework to do every day.

That is exaggerated. They can, but rarely do. In collège here they work from 8:15 to 16:35, and every other day they start late or finish early. Back in my time it was 8 to 17 most days and 8 to 12 on Wednesdays. Finishing at 18 was uncommon in lycée, and finishing at 19 only happened very occasionally at the university (and then we had lots of free time during the days).

> The French school schedule is absolutely not an example to follow.

The German schedule is good as well, but I am happy to have had 1 year less before going to the university.

Lighter schedules are brutal for working parents who need to stay at home or pay through the nose for additional childcare.

I live in Denmark. Here, lunch breaks are 30 minutes, but instead people leave work and go home at 4pm.

Lunch breaks should be short. School is a place where children gain knowledge and learn to function in society, and in a job.

That’s how they get their first taste of a vast bureaucracy that assets arbitrary limitation that serve no discernible purpose and deals out petty punishments

In my kids school 1 to 3rd grades (7 to 9 year olds approx) get 15 mins to eat a single course meal for lunch. My kid eats slowly, so never finishes.

Older kids can eat during breaks, the longest is 20 mins (that includes walking out of classroom and getting to cafeteria).

This is Poland.

Our schools in the usa excessive required instructional hours yet somehow the kids learn more in a one hour a week extra curricular math class than they do during normal “instruction”. More instructional time is clearly not the solution

Education in the vast majority of places is very bad. It's just a very hard problem and doesn't get the attention it deserves.

It requires a lot of labor so it’s very expensive

This is why we'll never see SpaceX rival out of Arianespace/ESA. France and most of Europe has a leisure culture. Good for them.

Now do the same argument with Boeing vs Airbus :)

In Polish schools we had 10 minute breaks, and for dinner we had one 15 minute break.

And everyone from high school juniors up - teachers, staff, students - smokes.

In germany, they just go home most days, school ends before lunch.

They should run chess blitz tournaments during the lunch breaks

Graduated high school about 15 years ago in Maryland. IIRC, lunch and recess were decently generous in elementary school, but of course there was no such luck in middle and high school. Lunch was just another period, so about 45 minutes. I was lucky to get decent periods most years, but with so many kids, someone had to eat at 10:00AM in order to make sure there were enough lunch periods to service the entire school. I would have liked time after lunch to use as a rest or study period; I distinctly remember getting crap from my post-lunch math teacher for falling asleep constantly in her class (in retrospect, I must have been mildly sleep-deprived, going through a growth spurt, AND crashing from my carb-heavy packed lunch), despite essentially acing all her tests.

I think, in general, Americans are loathe to build in "cushion" for human needs. I'm sure everyone has heard, "If you're on time, you're late."

>Now that we’re back in Vancouver

Maybe not such a great move.

1:30 combined lunch and recess. Why?

Don't underestimate the value of having lots of social time with classmates.

Football, mostly. And gossiping.

China definitely takes siesta.

are their schooling outcomes better?

no?

Perhaps "schooling outcomes" is not the single metric one should use when it comes to children. Or adults. Human beings in general.

Also, French schooling? Yeah, it's better than most systems with remarkable results to go with it.

What metrics would you prefer? Feelings?

Regarding France, my understanding is that their scores are some of the lowest in Europe and below the OCED average on the PISA exam (comparatively, the United States is above the OCED average), though there might be demographic considerations.

>What metrics would you prefer? Feelings?

If that is the only alternative you can imagine (or rather, pretend to be able to imagine to form a bad faith response), there is no point in continuing this conversation.

> that their scores are some of the lowest in Europe and below the OCED average on the PISA exam

Exactly! And yet they consistently produce some of the best engineers and scientists in the world, and have a stellar pure and applied mathematics tradition. So tell me, does this say something about the French schooling system, or about metrics like the OCED average?

Nevermind, don't tell me; your first paragraph above already demonstrated what kind of response to expect.

they consistently produce some of the best engineers and scientists in the world

All countries are capable to turning out a handful of amazing engineers and scientists each year from their top percentile students, almost no matter how terrible their school system is overall, so that in itself is pretty uninteresting. Is there any evidence that they are turning out significantly more of them that the rest of the OECD?

The other, more interesting, metric is how are their 50th percentile students doing, or their 25th or their 10th percentile students.

Sure PISA might to be a great metric, but just focusing how well the very brightest students in the country do is a far worse metric.

Please fix typo in title. Doesnt make sense now.

I think this needs a title correction. "can be two hours" instead of "ban be two hours"

French school day is 8hours.

US taxpayers don't want to pay for a full day of school. 8hr school hurts the private daycare economy and supports two-parent careers.

There's a bit of circular reasoning here. Do taxpayers comparatively want to pay even more for private daycare? Rural America has even less flexibility for work hours so it's usually a given.

Two-parent careers are here to stay, also.

In other words, it's yet another way to shift the "job creators"'s burden onto their workers. One of the silent ways they make you pay to work for them.

When I read these things I sometimes get this sense that there is this feeling of "superiority" with respect to leisure and family time from Europeans. I can't help but constantly think about how a lot of European countries got to this point because of the mass subjugation of other humans (think Africa and the Caribbean). For example, the current crisis in Haiti makes me think of the Haitian Independence Debt[0]. Sometimes I feel like a lot of the West is like a trust fund baby, where we live off the hard and dirty work of our parents, and turn a blind eye to the mass destruction of the earth and the countless millions of peoples lives who, even to this day, we take advantage of.

So I'm very glad the French can get 2 hours in the middle of the day to hang out and eat home cooked meals, while the earth slowly starts to boil around them, and while millions of people still suffer to this day because of actions their country has taken in the recent past.

I'm not saying that I don't believe humans should have more family time, more leisure time, and a better quality of life; but I do feel like we haven't done anything yet as a greater society to earn that right yet, as almost everything our foundation is built on seems incredibly unsustainable, and still needs a lot of work and thought put into it to get us there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_Independence_Debt

Britain did bad stuff around the world and our GDP productivity / hr figures are dog shit compared to France. So if you want that productivity directed towards saving the world, it would still make sense to look to France or Germany for inspiration on how to harness it more effectively.

I would suggest reading some more ancient history to get a larger view of the great accomplishments of the west and you might feel a little different. Some of them are:

Abolition of slavery world wide (almost everywhere)

Women liberation

The rule of law and not men

Great advances in medicine reducing suffering (anesthesia and surgery, vaccines)

Birth mortality going from 50% of children dying in 1800 to about 1% today

Maternal mortality going from 5 per 1000 to .1 per 1000

The average person being able to own their own private coach (car) and eat like the kings of old

Universal education

Space exploration

Of course there are many things to improve. Let's get at it.

None of these are ancient accomplishments if you like them. They're all since say 1900.

Yes. You need to know how things were for the span of history to understand how today is different.

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