The Physician Lunch Break Is Dead — and Something Died With It
On a recent Sunday morning, Jenna Geick, MD, ate breakfast before heading to her 8:00 AM NICU call as a fellow at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City. At 2:00 PM, she ate a small snack. And then, “lunch at 7:30 PM.”
Can you call that lunch?
For Geick and many contemporary physicians, this eating schedule is entirely normal. There is no designated break for lunch — or any meal — in the ICU. “You eat when you can,” she said. Lunch can mean scarfing a sandwich in front of a computer, eating while walking around the unit, or taking a few bites before getting called away to a patient and then returning later to something half-eaten and sad.
Once upon a time, the typical doctor’s lunch break looked different. It involved a full meal eaten around mid-shift and a break, stopping work, sitting down. It also involved eating alongside other people.
Doctors who trained decades ago can summon vivid memories of their workday meals: midnight birthday buffets, catered noon conferences, team discussions over where to order dinner after a chaotic emergency room (ER) shift. They remember the food — and they remember who was sitting beside them.
The demise of the shared meal is a phenomenon that extends beyond the medical field. According to the World Happiness Report 2025, roughly 1 in 4 US adults reported eating all of their meals alone on the previous day in 2023, an increase of more than 50% since 2003. Those who ate alone, unsurprisingly, reported substantially lower life satisfaction.
Jokes about losing one’s lunch aside, what, indeed, has been lost? The physicians we spoke to talk about deeper rewards and ultimately a shared meal making medicine a shared experience.
Today we’re left with the portrait of the modern lunch: solitary, hurried, teeming with interruptions, and increasingly indistinguishable from the rest of the workday.
“It’s a reflection of what’s valued now,” said Indu Subramanian, MD.
When Lunch Was a Break
When Subramanian was doing her emergency medicine rotation in the mid-1990s, food was what she looked forward to most.
“I hated the ER,” said Subramanian, now a neurologist at the Veterans Affairs and clinical professor of neurology at UCLA. She felt dizzy and discombobulated as the patients she met were soon whisked away to other parts of the hospital, their outcomes remaining a mystery to her. The sole stabilizing ritual was sharing a meal in the wake — or the midst — of that chaos.
“The one thing I did enjoy doing was eating with the team,” Subramanian said. “You would have just run a code and there was blood everywhere and somebody had died. But then you’d be like, ‘Okay. Well, let’s go eat.’ It was a break from the madness.”
They would sit down in a designated shared space as physicians from different specialties wandered in and out. Subramanian found herself talking with trauma surgeons and Navy physicians whose work she otherwise might never have understood. Each ER attending had their food preferences, which the team memorized: For one doctor, order the spring rolls from that restaurant. For another, ask for extra sauce.
Food became one of the ways Subramanian learned about the places and people around her. When she moved from Toronto to San Diego for her internship at the Scripps Mercy Hospital, medical talks often came with lunch from local restaurants. She tried Afghan food for the first time and fell in love with a tomato-eggplant dish. Filipino rice desserts such as suman and bibingka carried smells that reminded her of her mother’s Indian cooking, comforting her during hectic night shifts.
But most memorable of all were the potato taquitos from a Mexican restaurant called El Indio.
“In this hospital, everyone was speaking Spanish,” Subramanian recalled. “I didn’t speak the language, but I fell in love with the culture through the food. I loved the tacos, the spice of the salsas. I picked up the language slowly and then ended up moving to LA.”
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