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Comment by isodev | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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