Due to lack of appetite or other reasons, more and more young people are not eating in the morning, a new survey reveals.
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“It makes me nauseous. I take my first bite around 10:30,” says Jana Amil, 19, about her morning habits.
The CEGEP student is part of the 5% of Quebecers who never eat in the morning. This is what emerges from a survey conducted in March by Caddle on behalf of the Agri-Food Analysis Laboratory at Dalhousie University.
In Generation Z, whose members were born between 1997 and 2005, 19% “rarely” take the time to eat lunch. The number drops to 10% for all respondents.
“I like to stay in bed as long as possible. I eat my lunch around 11 a.m.,” says another CEGEP student, Estelle Donofrio, 19 years old.
Estelle Donofrio, 19, only eats lunch on weekends.
photo julien mcevoy
The weekend, adds the young woman, is different, since she has more time. She takes the opportunity to enjoy herself as soon as she gets out of bed.
Lunch is no longer popular
“The young people are snacking. They eat lunch, on the road or they grab an energy bar,” illustrates the sponsor of the study, Sylvain Charlebois.
Lunch is thus “called into question”, wonders the food specialist. The older people are, the more important lunch is, however.
table taken from the Caddle survey/Dalhousie University Agri-Food Analysis Laboratory
Young people are also half as likely to drink coffee as their elders, which fascinates the researcher.
table taken from the Caddle survey/Dalhousie University Agri-Food Analysis Laboratory
“I didn’t expect such a difference between the generations. This is a big change for the industry if it is confirmed over time,” observes Sylvain Charlebois.
A little two eggs and bacon for $20?
Lunch is always eaten at home for the vast majority of people, 80% of whom do it regularly. Another 11% eat at work in the morning, compared to 2% who regularly eat at restaurants.
The high price of restaurant lunches is perhaps a barrier to the practice. The team of 24 hours recently calculated that a traditional two-egg-bacon is worth an average of $20 these days.
If you make it at home, it’s more like $4 to $4.75, depending on the number of slices of bacon you want.
While the price of food has doubled in two years, the habits of Quebecers are changing. And never is this more evident than with lunch, often considered the most important meal of the day.
Méthodologie du sondage
The survey was conducted in March 2024 and had a total of 9,165 respondents. This number is both the weighted and unweighted total, indicating that each respondent was counted once in the analysis, and any adjustments made to ensure representativeness did not change the total number of respondents. The survey’s margin of error, assuming a 95% confidence level, is approximately 1.71%. This means that the survey results are expected to be within ±0.63 percentage points of what would have been obtained if the entire population had been surveyed, 95 times out of 100.