The Romans didn't really eat it, usually consuming only one meal a day around noon, says food historian Caroline Yeldham. In fact, breakfast was actively frowned upon. This thinking impacted on the way people ate for a very long time. In the Middle Ages monastic life largely shaped when people ate, says food historian Ivan Day.
Nothing could be eaten before morning Mass and meat could only be eaten for half the days of the year. It's thought the word breakfast entered the English language during this time and literally meant "break the night's fast".
Religious ritual also gave us the full English breakfast. Much of that meat was pork and bacon as pigs were kept by many people. The meat was often eaten with eggs, which also had to be used up, and the precursor of the full English breakfast was born. But at the time it probably wasn't eaten in the morning. In about the 17th Century it is believed that all social classes started eating breakfast, according to chef Clarissa Dickson Wright.
After the restoration of Charles II, coffee, tea and dishes like scrambled eggs started to appear on the tables of the wealthy. By the late s, breakfast rooms also started appearing in the homes of the rich. This morning meal reached new levels of decadence in aristocratic circles in the 19th Century, with the fashion for hunting parties that lasted days, even weeks. Up to 24 dishes would be served for breakfast.
The Industrial Revolution in the midth Century regularised working hours, with labourers needing an early meal to sustain them at work. All classes started to eat a meal before going to work, even the bosses. At the turn of the 20th Century, breakfast was revolutionised once again by American John Harvey Kellogg. He accidentally left some boiled maize out and it went stale.
He passed it through some rollers and baked it, creating the world's first cornflake. He sparked a multi-billion pound industry. By the s and s the government was promoting breakfast as the most important meal of the day, but then World War II made the usual breakfast fare hard to get. But as Britain emerged from the post-war years into the economically liberated s, things like American toasters, sliced bread, instant coffee and pre-sugared cereals invaded the home. Industrialized food processing began to provide an array of products marketed as quick-and-easy breakfast foods —products that had never previously existed but whose ubiquity accelerated after World War II.
Industrialized breakfasts such as cornflakes and instant oatmeal make for meals that are generally small and nutritionally hollow, which meant that people then needed to eat again during the day before commuting home for a later dinner, which was—and often still is—important for its role in family social life. You can probably see the fault lines already. Of course vanishing commutes, remote schooling, and the flexibility to make a sandwich during a conference call would change how people eat.
The three-meal-a-day axiom was created to bend human life around the necessity of leaving the home to work elsewhere for the whole day, and now people are bending once again, around a whole new set of challenges.
Our old eating schedules are no more natural than sitting in a cubicle for 10 hours a day. Read: Yes, the pandemic is ruining your body. But food is a fraught emotional topic, and people often worry that changes in their behavior—even those that feel natural—are somehow unhealthy. Rachel Larkey, a registered dietitian in Yonkers, New York, who specializes in treating eating disorders among her mostly low-income clients, has heard this worry frequently over the past year.
These challenges hit everybody differently. What matters, Larkey told me, is whether the changes in your eating habits make you feel good and healthy—whether they fit your current life and your needs better than what you were doing before. New or worsening food compulsions, such as eating far more or far less than you used to, are cause for alarm.
For now, though, go ahead and do whatever feels right. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. How did this custom start and is it evolving? The history of three meals a day Going back through the history of food, we know that breakfast has been an absent meal for most. Evolution of the custom to present day Over the centuries, there have been many factors from economic to religious , that have basically conditioned us to eat three meals a day — and there have also been many studies that have denied the importance of one meal rather over the other or studies that even propose alternative dietary models altogether.
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