Skip to main content

Who arbitrarily decided what are acceptable foods for specific mealtimes?

I am a huge breakfast for dinner person. Which then made me think how I would much rather have cold pasta for breakfast than what society considers breakfast foods. And then it made me think, who and/or when did we decide that cereal, eggs (however you like them cooked), waffles, and pancakes, bacon, and sausage were a morning thing? Somehow, we snuck in potatoes for breakfast as hash browns or home fries and the Brits sneak in some beans. Yes, a “traditional breakfast” will vary by culture and a “traditional brunch” has a different meaning in the Deep South and the North East, but there are still enough commonalities where society has deemed certain foods as “breakfast” and has deemed it unacceptable to eat those foods at any other time of the day, except for maybe at brunch.

The same could be said for lunch, with things like sandwiches (lunch meat) and paninis, but there isn’t as much of a well this is a lunch thing only like there is with breakfast or dinner. There are some people who are firmly in the camp of NO BREAKFAST FOR DINNER and then there are the people like me who just want whatever food at whatever time and don’t really give a shit if it’s the appropriate time to eat it. 

I did some very minimal googling (i.e. read the Wikipedia page on the History of Breakfast and on Dinner) to try to make some sense of it and I learned that popcorn cereal was a thing in the 1800s. But overall, it only reinforced to me that it’s all just arbitrary!

Yes, there are studies about how skipping breakfast is bad for a person. I’m not skipping breakfast if I choose to eat some pasta salad instead of some cereal, eggs, bacon, or yogurt. And yea, there is probably a point in history where people realized they had more energy for "the days’ work" if they ate one thing over another and that carried on through time, or it was just based on what the peasants, merchant class, or aristocrats could afford, and/or some combination of it all before modern modern research into dietetics and nutrition were a thing. (More research would clear this up so maybe I'll do a follow up post at some point on the history of food consumption by humans.)

But there is really nothing that says I MUST ONLY eat cold cereal or eggs for breakfast and that I must only eat a heavy meal with a main dish with at least one side for dinner. So, for now, I will continue to believe it's all just arbitrarily decided and just eat non-breakfast foods for breakfast and breakfast foods for dinner.

Side note – Since I know there is also a debate over dinner vs. supper, when I say dinner, and I probably should have said it by now if it wasn't already obvious, I am referring to the third and generally largest meal of the day (but that’s not what this post is about and requires a deeper interwebs search about the evolution of language and the variances depending on regional dialect). 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

No Phone Case, No Problem

I took my phone out of its case so I could clean the case and my god do I love a naked iPhone. I just don't want to put it back in the case. I know I probably should put it back in the case so I don't get a cracked screen... but then I remember I once dropped my case-less iPhone down a concrete flight of stairs (like the kind of massive concrete staircases in major sports arenas) and it was like nothing happened. Not a dam scratch on that thing! So for now at least, I'm gonna live on the edge! No case! Knowing full well that I will put the case back on the second I drop my phone on my nose because I don't have a good grip on it without using a popsocket.. and the popsocket is on my case... ✌

How Many Times Have you Watched One Tree Hill?

There’s a quote in the show One Tree Hill:   Tree Hill is a place somewhere in the world. Maybe it’s a lot like your world, maybe it’s nothing like it. But if you look closer, you might see someone like you.   The full quote, from a Lucas Scott voiceover, is much longer, but that is the part that stood out to me. Tree Hill is a fictitious town on a television show, filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina. But, the characters resonate with the audience watching in many different ways. And, if the audience is like me, it resonates differently at the different stages of life we are experiencing when it is re-watched.   When I first watched One Tree Hill, when it premiered, I was in middle school. When the series finale aired, I was about to finish my sophomore year of college. I grew up with the show, but not really. After the characters graduated high school, the show does a time jump to their world after the four years of college. So, when I was in high school and college, th...

So, Where Ya From?

"So, where ya from?" To most, it’s a simple question. An icebreaker. Small talk. To others, it is not so simple of a question. The question is asked at networking events, conferences, first dates, sorority recruitment, and even during the icebreaker games professors play to start a new semester. It is a question with the potential to launch a rudimentary bond between strangers. The question is a starting point. It’s an easy question to ask but what about the answer? Like I said before, it depends. Some people are born and raised in the same town their entire life, others move to a different city/town in the same state, and others move a bit further away. I personally was born in one city, lived in the suburbs of that city through elementary school, moved out of the state before middle school, and eventually moved to where I live now for grad school. So, when someone asks me “so, where ya from?” I don’t always give the same answer. I don’t overtly lie to them, but I might...