The Most Important Meal of the Day
November 4, 2023 8:50 AM Subscribe
Are there any cultures worldwide that as a rule/habit do not eat breakfast? I'm not interested in social habits of groups of individuals who tend to skip a meal, or the European memeification of coffee and a cigarette. I am talking we as a culture/country/etc regularly do not start the day with some kind of sustenance. Historical okay.
In Fast and Feast, Bridget Ann Henisch says that the ideal number of daily meals in medieval Europe was two, dinner and supper (with dinner, the biggest meal, eaten around noon). She gives specific instances of medieval people eating breakfast but it seems to have acted more like an optional snack.
posted by yarntheory at 9:13 AM on November 4, 2023
posted by yarntheory at 9:13 AM on November 4, 2023
I have heard that some of the aboriginal people in New Guinea did not necessarily eat every day before they got westernized.
The more primitive your culture and the more complex food production is the more likely they are not to eat breakfast. One common practice in the Medieval era ( French - English - German) seems to have been to have only two meals a day, with the morning meal being served between 10 AM to 1 PM, which could mean fairly soon after they got up in the winter, but would be quite a long time after they got up in the summer. However "broken meats" were available for children, sick people and pregnant women. These would be cold leftovers, as meat just meant food generally before it replaced the word flesh that was previously used to indicate dead animal you can eat. The meats are broken, meaning that the loaves would be cut or larger things either carved or cut up. They were no longer intact and thus liable to spoil.
Part of why the technologically more primitive cultures eat late is because if you have to start the morning by starting the fire and get it hot enough to cook with, and then actually cook something it can take quite awhile to get the food ready. It just wouldn't be practical for everyone to sit down to a hearty breakfast unless the poor cooks got up much earlier than everyone. And the food they ate tended to need quite a lot of preparation so to eat just after dawn they would have to be up in the middle of the night tending fires and preparing things.
Medieval people would often grind their grain into flour to help keep it from sprouting, but because flour could easily spoil and required containers that were vermin proof and didn't leak dust, they would often bake it into bread which would be rock hard, and could be stored, such as from a sack hung from the rafters. Fresh bread was a very time consuming operation indeed, as the fire would have to heat up the clay or stone walls of the oven before it was put out, raked out of the chamber and the dough placed where the fire had been burning, and the oven sealed to keep the heat in and slow bake the raw dough. At the best of times it had a hard, often slightly charred crust and a low gluten content. It was often eaten as sops, by soaking it in hot broth. That mean that simply grabbing a piece of bread for breakfast could be hard on the teeth and require much patient gnawing and sucking.
Other alternatives like fish also took time. If you owned a lot of things and were comfortably well off, you might have a tub of live fish, scoop one out and kill it and grill it or fry it once the fire was hot enough to cook - but most people wouldn't have that kind of a set up, so for them starting the day with some quickly killed fish would mean catching it first.
The one time when Medieval people did eat early in the day was when they were setting off on a journey. In that case they were advised to break their fast before they departed, a sensible precaution if they were likely to end up walking all day with no meals being served, as carrying your food in your belly meant you could carry more of whatever else you wanted to carry. This is why the early first meal we eat is called break fast - it comes from the expectation that you were eating before you normally would be expected to eat. And breaking their fast at dawn was not such a big burden on their cooks, since departing on a journey was not an everyday occurrence.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:15 AM on November 4, 2023 [75 favorites]
The more primitive your culture and the more complex food production is the more likely they are not to eat breakfast. One common practice in the Medieval era ( French - English - German) seems to have been to have only two meals a day, with the morning meal being served between 10 AM to 1 PM, which could mean fairly soon after they got up in the winter, but would be quite a long time after they got up in the summer. However "broken meats" were available for children, sick people and pregnant women. These would be cold leftovers, as meat just meant food generally before it replaced the word flesh that was previously used to indicate dead animal you can eat. The meats are broken, meaning that the loaves would be cut or larger things either carved or cut up. They were no longer intact and thus liable to spoil.
Part of why the technologically more primitive cultures eat late is because if you have to start the morning by starting the fire and get it hot enough to cook with, and then actually cook something it can take quite awhile to get the food ready. It just wouldn't be practical for everyone to sit down to a hearty breakfast unless the poor cooks got up much earlier than everyone. And the food they ate tended to need quite a lot of preparation so to eat just after dawn they would have to be up in the middle of the night tending fires and preparing things.
Medieval people would often grind their grain into flour to help keep it from sprouting, but because flour could easily spoil and required containers that were vermin proof and didn't leak dust, they would often bake it into bread which would be rock hard, and could be stored, such as from a sack hung from the rafters. Fresh bread was a very time consuming operation indeed, as the fire would have to heat up the clay or stone walls of the oven before it was put out, raked out of the chamber and the dough placed where the fire had been burning, and the oven sealed to keep the heat in and slow bake the raw dough. At the best of times it had a hard, often slightly charred crust and a low gluten content. It was often eaten as sops, by soaking it in hot broth. That mean that simply grabbing a piece of bread for breakfast could be hard on the teeth and require much patient gnawing and sucking.
Other alternatives like fish also took time. If you owned a lot of things and were comfortably well off, you might have a tub of live fish, scoop one out and kill it and grill it or fry it once the fire was hot enough to cook - but most people wouldn't have that kind of a set up, so for them starting the day with some quickly killed fish would mean catching it first.
The one time when Medieval people did eat early in the day was when they were setting off on a journey. In that case they were advised to break their fast before they departed, a sensible precaution if they were likely to end up walking all day with no meals being served, as carrying your food in your belly meant you could carry more of whatever else you wanted to carry. This is why the early first meal we eat is called break fast - it comes from the expectation that you were eating before you normally would be expected to eat. And breaking their fast at dawn was not such a big burden on their cooks, since departing on a journey was not an everyday occurrence.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:15 AM on November 4, 2023 [75 favorites]
Some of the answers to my previous Ask on history, culture, and meals per day might be useful to you.
posted by FencingGal at 10:20 AM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by FencingGal at 10:20 AM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
I want to push back politely on your premise that breakfast is "the start of the day." In my own lifetime, and in the two cultures I have been a part of (rural farm and military), days began with 2-4 hours of work (i.e. things like chores, PT, ruck march, feeding livestock, chipping ice in the motor pool, etc.) and only THEN did breakfast occur. So you got up at 4:30 am or sometime after that, labored, and then had breakfast at 7:30 or 8:00 am. It didn't always happen that way, but often enough that I have just assumed that it was a rural and military habit going back to the middle ages or before. I think a closer look at the various cultures' actual daily life known to historians might reveal more instances of this type of schedule than people assume. I'm curious now about it myself! Thanks for the question.
posted by seasparrow at 11:25 AM on November 4, 2023 [20 favorites]
posted by seasparrow at 11:25 AM on November 4, 2023 [20 favorites]
The Romans had a norm of eating once a day; basically a big lunch.
No they didn’t. They commonly ate 3 or even 4 times per day.
posted by jedicus at 2:00 PM on November 4, 2023 [4 favorites]
No they didn’t. They commonly ate 3 or even 4 times per day.
posted by jedicus at 2:00 PM on November 4, 2023 [4 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by kickingtheground at 9:11 AM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]