Guess How Much Time You Spend Eating on an Average Day

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey tells us just how we spend every minute of our day.
Guess How Much Time You Spend Eating on an Average Day

How much time do you think you spend eating and drinking, on an average weekday? How about on an average day during the weekend?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has just released its annual breakdown of how we Americans spend our time each day — the American Time Use Survey — and it turns out that, on average, we spend only 1 hour and 8 minutes of every weekday consuming food and drink, and not much more than that — only 1 hour and 17 minutes — eating and drinking on weekends and holidays.

Meanwhile, we spend about 34 minutes on food preparation and cleanup, on average, on any given weekday, and about 37 minutes preparing and cleaning up after our meals on weekends and holidays.

That doesn’t sound like much, especially when you compare it with the amount of time the average American spends watching TV every weekday: 2 hours and 36 minutes, which itself is dwarfed by the 3 hours and 21 minutes we spend, on average, watching it on weekends and holidays.

Interestingly, while only 43 percent of men spent any time at all on food preparation or cleanup (compared with 69 percent of women who did) on an average day in 2014, that was a fairly substantial increase over the 35 percent of men who generally participated in food prep and cleanup in 2003.

The percentage of women doing housework — including cleaning and laundry — on an average day declined from 54 percent in 2003 to 49 percent in 2014. By comparison, in 2014, only 20 percent of men did any housework at all on an average day.

On the other hand, the amount of time women spent doing housework also decreased — from 58 minutes in 2003 to 49 minutes in 2014. No word on whether we women now spend the 9 minutes we used to spend on housework complaining about how much more housework we’re still doing, on average, than men.

Photo courtesy of iStock

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