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.”

She still lives there. She still drives to San Diego, kids in tow, to eat at El Indio. And she still keeps in touch with friends from residency with whom she shared those taquitos decades ago.

Today, Subramanian tries to find ways to bridge the meal-sharing gap. For special occasions, she invites her team to an Indian buffet, encouraging everyone to sample different dishes. “Try this. Have a spoon of that. This is how you eat this,” she tells them.

A bite of gulab jamun or a sip of chai can transport Subramanian back to childhood. Meanwhile, for her colleagues, the meal is a pathway to discovery — not just of flavors but also of a neglected kind of fellowship.

“You’re learning, and you’re bonding with your team through a shared eating experience,” Subramanian said. Once, this was not a special occasion. It was simply part of the day.

A Table for All

Food was also a gateway to culture for Olivia Begasse de Dhaem, MD, a neurologist and assistant professor of neurology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs who started medical school in 2011. During her internal medicine residency at New York University in New York City, the cafeteria periodically rotated chefs. When a French chef arrived, Begasse de Dhaem, who grew up in Belgium and lived in France, found that the food sparked conversations about her life outside the hospital. “It’s just so much easier to start a low-pressure, low-key conversation with food around,” she said.

Begasse de Dhaem has eaten in hospitals all over the world, and the mealtime customs have varied more than the food itself. In France, doctors routinely ate together in the cafeteria or went out for sandwiches and soup from a nearby bakery. During long emergency shifts, full trays of food were delivered to the call room. In Australia, team members gathered for morning or afternoon tea. In contrast to the US, both of these countries’ lunch breaks are protected by law.

The American lunch break has been less consistent but, in her experience, more democratic. In France and Australia, doctors primarily ate with others at the same level of training. In the US, Begasse de Dhaem has shared meals with attendings, fellows, residents, and administrative staff, sometimes all at once. 

At these tables, she has felt the medical hierarchy flatten. “You’re all sitting at the same level,” she said. “It’s more intimate. It leads to a lot of good ideas being generated. Things flow better outside of a stricter, more high-stakes environment.”

And if the conversation stalled, there was always the food. “Worse comes to worst, we could start talking about the food we were eating,” Begasse de Dhaem said. “People opened up more freely, and I got to learn more about people than I would just stopping in the hallway and greeting someone.”

When Lunch Became Another Task

The modern medical lunch looks and feels quite different.

Begasse de Dhaem remembers how eating became an afterthought during her 3-year neurology residency at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. “I barely ate anything,” she said. “Sadly, I was living mostly on water and coffee. Sometimes the nurses had some food to share, but usually it was remnants of cake and pizza.”

Sometimes, the irony was pointed out by the people she was treating. “Patients have shared food with me in the hospital, feeling so bad that we would not get a break,” she said. “We observe them to learn about them, but they observe us, too. It always made me feel guilty that I was not able to follow the advice that I was preaching about eating well.”

The consequences of skipping breaks for physicians are well documented, from poor nutrition to decreased decision-making capacity to burnout. But as many physicians know, the reason behind the disappearing lunch is simple: There is too much to do.

For many physicians, the demands of the day shape not only when but also what they eat. While on service as a neonatology fellow, Geick said, she needs something she can eat quickly — or, at least, something that will still be edible if “lunch” gets pushed to dinnertime. She dreams of being able to consistently rely on a fresh salad or a nourishing meal that involves mixing and heating, but often there just isn’t time.

“I drink a lot of Diet Coke,” Geick said. “I feel like it’s probably a security blanket for me, to tell you the truth.”

Even Subramanian, a wellness advocate, has not escaped the momentum of the modern mealtime. Breakfast tends to be coffee and yogurt on the run. Her lunches, she said, are “pretty terrible.” Sitting down to savor an hour-long meal happens perhaps once a quarter.

“I wish I could say that I was more intentional about what I eat, but I often just end up grabbing something,” she said. “It’s a lot of efficiency and quick, on-the-go things.”

As she says, this is a reflection of our values now.

Technology is an obvious place to point. Smartphones, electronic health records, and patient portals have made it easier for work to follow physicians into every empty moment. But medicine’s missing-break problem predates much of that technology. A 2010 US study found that 1 in 10 nurses never took a proper break, and roughly 1 in 3 rarely or never took meal breaks during their shifts.

Technology did not directly create the culture of working through lunch. It did, however, lead the work to accelerate and expand beyond its prior boundaries.

“Often the mealtime is just typing notes and finishing encounters,” Subramanian said. “The time pressure of work and the extra ‘pajama time’ of closing your medical records and answering MyChart messages all lead to people stuffing their faces while typing, rushing to the next thing.”

And the trade-off is not just lunch vs work; sometimes, it’s lunch vs the life waiting outside of work. “I eat as fast as I can so I can get back to work,” Geick said. “Especially now, having had my daughter, I’d rather work through lunch. That way, I can get home and spend time with her.”

Nobody formally declared lunch dead. The work simply expanded into it, absorbed it, and swallowed it up like a late-night vending machine snack.

What We Lost Along With Lunch

Many health systems spend considerable time and money trying to address physician burnout and build resilient teams through “wellness” initiatives. During her residency at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Geick recalls a cookie-decorating contest, picture-frame making, and Starbucks gift cards. They weren’t a cure.

Lunch won’t solve all of the healthcare workforce’s problems, either. But the loss of the shared meal raises questions about what else is lost along with that unscheduled, unstructured time together.

Most lunches do not bring about a research breakthrough or a lifelong friendship. But they can create time without an urgent task. Time to vent about a shift. Time to ask about someone’s childhood. Time to discover a new food, hear about another specialty, or learn which attending would appreciate an order of spring rolls or extra sauce.

“A shared meal is about getting back to some of the stillness, the times of quiet, the real connection that’s not rushed,” Subramanian said. “It’s finding ways to bring out those shared things that make us feel whole, whether that’s food, the energy between people in a real space, touch, laughter — all of that shared, beautiful stuff that we need as humans.”

The experts cited in this article had no relevant disclosures.