TOTALLY GEEKED!

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/06/breakfast-the-most-contentious-meal-of-the-day/487220/

It was the (up)shot heard ‘round the world. In May, The New York Times’s data blog, having conducted a lengthy review of scholarly assessments of the meal that Americans have been told, time after time, is the day’s most important, declared what many had known, in their hearts as well as their stomachs, to be true: “Sorry, there’s nothing magical about breakfast.”

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The pre-emptive “sorry” was an appropriate way both to soften the announcement and to sharpen it: Breakfast—when to eat it, what to eat for it (cereal? smoothies? cage-free eggs fried in organic Irish butter?), whether to eat it at all—has long been a subject of intense debate, accompanied by intense confusion and intense feeling. “Breakfast nowadays is cool,” the writer Jen Doll noted in Extra Crispy, the new newsletter from Time magazine that is devoted to, yep, breakfast. She wrote that in an essay about her failed attempt to enjoy pre-noon eating.

But breakfast wasn’t always cool. People of the Middle Ages shunned it on roughly the same grounds—food’s intimate connection to moral ideals of self-regimentation—that people of the current age glorify it; later, those navigating the collision of industrialization and the needs of the human body came to blame hearty breakfasts for indigestion and other ailments. Breakfast has been subject to roughly the same influences that any other fickle food fashions will be: social virality, religious dogmas, economic cycles, new scientific discoveries about the truth or falsity of the old saying “you are what you eat.” And all that has meant that the meal associated with the various intimacies of the morning hours has transformed, fairly drastically, over the centuries. Our current confusion when it comes to breakfast is, for better or worse, nothing new: We in the West, when it comes to our eggs—and our pancakes, and our bacon, and our muffins, and our yogurt, and our coffee—have long been a little bit scrambled.

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The Europeans of the Middle Ages largely eschewed breakfast. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, lists praepropere—eating too soon—as one of the ways to commit the deadly sin of gluttony; the eating of a morning meal, following that logic, was generally considered to be an affront against God and the self. Fasting was seen as evidence of one’s ability to negate the desires of the flesh; the ideal eating schedule, from that perspective, was a light dinner (then consumed at midday) followed by heartier supper in the evening. People of the Middle Ages, the food writer Heather Arndt Anderson notes in her book Breakfast: A History, sometimes took another evening meal, an indulgent late-evening snack called thereresoper (“rear supper”). The fact that the reresoper was taken with ale and wine, Anderson writes, meant that it was “shunned by most decent folk”; that fact also might have contributed to breakfast’s own low status among medieval moralists, as “it was presumed that if one ate breakfast, it was because one had other lusty appetites as well.”

There were some exceptions to those prohibitions. Laborers were allowed a breakfast—they needed the calories for their morning exertions—as were the elderly, the infirm, and children. Still, the meal they took was generally small—a chunk of bread, a piece of cheese, perhaps some ale—and not treated as a “meal,” a social event, so much as a pragmatic necessity.

‘It was presumed that if one ate breakfast, it was because one had other lusty appetites as well.’

It was Europe’s introduction to chocolate, Anderson argues, that helped to change people’s perspective on the moral propriety of breaking fast in the morning hours. “Europe was delirious with joy” at the simultaneous arrival, via expeditions of the New World, of coffee, tea, and chocolate (which Europeans of the time often took as a beverage), she writes. Chocolate in particular “caused such an ecstatic uproar among Europe’s social elite that the Catholic Church began to feel the pressure to change the rules.” And so, in 1662, Cardinal Francis Maria Brancaccio declared that “Liquidum non frangit jejunum”: “Liquid doesn’t break the fast.”

That barrier to breakfast having been dismantled, people started to become breakfast enthusiasts. Thomas Cogan, a schoolmaster in Manchester, was soon claiming that breakfast, far from being merely acceptable, was in fact necessary to one’s health: “[to] suffer hunger long filleth the stomack with ill humors.” Queen Elizabeth was once recorded eating a hearty breakfast of bread, ale, wine, and “a good pottage [stew], like a farmer’s, made of mutton or beef with ‘real bones.’”

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century—and the rise of factory work and office jobs that accompanied it—further normalized breakfast, transforming it, Abigail Carroll writes in Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal, from an indulgence to an expectation. The later years of the 1800s, in particular, saw an expansion of the morning meal into a full-fledged social event. Wealthy Victorians in the U.S. and in England dedicated rooms in their homes to breakfasting, the BBC notes, considering the meal a time for the family to gather before they scattered for the day. Newspapers targeted themselves for at-the-table consumption by the men of the families. Morning meals of the wealthy often involved enormous, elaborate spreads: meats, stews, sweets.