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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). ✌
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