Heather Arndt Anderson - Breakfast: a history

Series Foreword

Custom becomes second nature, and this is especially true of meals. We expect to eat them at a certain time and place, and we have a set of scripted foods considered appropriate for each. Bacon, eggs, and toast are breakfast; sandwiches are lunch; meat, potatoes, and vegetables are dinner, followed by dessert. Breakfast for dinner is so much fun precisely because it is out of the ordinary and transgressive. But meal patterns were not always this way. In the Middle Ages people ate two meals, the larger in the morning. Today the idea of a heavy meal with meat and wine at 11:00 a.m. strikes us as strange and decidedly unpleasant. Likewise when abroad, the food that people eat, at what seems to us the wrong time of day, can be shocking. Again, our customs have become so ingrained that we assume they are natural, correct, and biologically sound.

The Meals series will demonstrate exactly the opposite. Not only have meal times changed, but the menu as well, both through history and around the globe. Only a simple bowl of soup with a crust of bread for supper? That is where the name comes from. Our dinner, coming from disner in Old French, disjejeunare in Latin, actually means to break fast and was eaten in the morning. Each meal also has its own unique characteristics that evolve over time. We will see the invention of the picnic and barbecue, the gradual adoption of lunch as a new midday meal, and even certain meals practiced as hallowed institutions in some places but scarcely at all elsewhere, such as teathe meal, not the drink. Often food items suddenly appear in a meal as quintessential, such as cold breakfast cereal, the invention of men like Kellogg and Post. Or they disappear, like oysters for breakfast. Sometimes an entire meal springs from nowhere under unique social conditions, like brunch.

Of course, the decay of the family meal is a topic that deeply concerns us, as people catch a quick bite at their desk or on the go, or eat with their eyes glued to the television set. If eating is one of the greatest pleasures in life, one has to wonder what it says about us when we wolf down a meal in a few minutes flat or when no one talks at the dinner table. Still, mealtime traditions persist for special occasions. They are the time we remind ourselves of who we are and where we come from, when grandmas special lasagna comes to the table for a Sunday dinner, or a Passover Seder is set exactly the same way it has been for thousands of years. We treasure these food rituals precisely because they keep us rooted in a rapidly changing world.

The Meals series examines the meal as both a historical construct and a global phenomenon. A single meal in each volume is anatomized, its social and cultural meaning brought into sharp focus, and the customs and manners of various people are explained in context. Each volume also looks closely at the foods we commonly include and why. In the end I hope you will never take your mealtime customs for granted again.

Ken Albala

University of the Pacific

Acknowledgments

To my dear husband Scott and little son Zephyr, thank you for giving me an opportunity to put my boring environmental consulting career on the back burner so that I would have time for this.

To my editors Ken Albala and Wendi Schnaufer, I appreciate all of your sensible feedback and cheerleading, and I have learned so much through this process.

Thank you to my writing group, who tirelessly workshopped every page: Dana Cuellar, Art Edwards, Sarah Gilbert, Laurel Hermanson, David Lindenbaum, Rebecca Kelley, Mark Russell, and Michael Zeiss. I could not have done this without your invaluable, diverse input, and I am a better writer because of you.

Big thanks to the Multnomah County Library, for allowing me to flood your online interlibrary loan system with requests for obscure 19th-century housekeepers guides and war-era magazine articles, I owe you my gratitude. You are worth every tax dollar.

Speaking of tax dollars, thank you, U.S. School Breakfast Program, for ensuring I had a (free) hot morning meal every school day.

Introduction

Whether a bowlful of cloying, artificially fruit-flavored Os with milk, or a stinking pile of fermented soybeans on steamed rice, breakfast fuels hungry brains. As the old adage says, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It is the meal that makes the champion. Breakfast literally breaks the fast of nighttime slumber, filling ones raging belly and providing the stamina to face the day. From the development of agriculture and the use of stone grinding tools in the Neolithic to the hardboiled eggs and Malt-O-Meal in todays kitchens, much of what is eaten for breakfast has changed curiously little. Human attitudes toward breakfast have, however, changed plenty.