What's the Deal with Lunch Hour?

My Mind is getting foggier and foggier as I get older, but I distinctly recall only getting ahour for lunch when I was in school. In fact not even an hour, because there was inevitably some teacher who decided his lesson plan, was infimitely more important than your nutritional requirements and kept you five mintues past the bell, then you had to drop off your crap at your locker, and by the time you actually reached the caf it was 20 after, giving you just enough time to wolf down some gross fries and gravy and meet up with friends in the hall to hang around until it was time to rush back to your locker and get your crap for your next class.

Of course that was junior high, in senior high we had a double block, so the class before lunch was the same class after lunch which meant you could just leave your crap there and race to whoever's car you happened to be leaving for lunch in. If you had a spare period and it fell on a double block that day it was awsome, and almost not worth going to school at all that day... but what the hell is happening at the highschools now? 10 to 11 there's a group of kids already lined up at McDonalds in Brunswick square waiting for them to start serving lunch, and the mass of kids stays in the mall and uptown until 2 pm. How long is the bloody lunch hour today? and when are these kids ever in school anymore?

I know all about spare periods..I majored in them, with a minor in skipping out, but the groups uptown are way way way too large to be explained away that way.