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Podcast Transcript
Every day, billions of people around the world wake up and have breakfast.
Breakfast is very different than the other meals you eat in a day. The types of food that people consume for breakfast are usually much more narrow than what they might be for lunch or dinner.
Moreover, the way we eat breakfast and what we eat is very different from the types of meals people ate in the past.
Learn more about the history of breakfast on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Breakfast is a very funny thing. Most people have a very set group of foods that they think of when they think of breakfast.
If you go out for dinner, you might go out for pizza or BBQ, or you might go out for Chinese, Indian, Italian or Mexican.
However, you don’t do that when you go out for breakfast. You just go for breakfast. Some restaurants specialize in breakfast, and it is just assumed that you roughly know what the menu is.
You almost never go out for breakfasts of a particular cuisine. You just go out for breakfast.
It would be very difficult to do a history of lunch or dinner because that is just the history of food. The history of breakfast is different.
One of the interesting things about the history of breakfast is that a common threat runs through almost every culture. While the specific foods they eat might be different, the common thread is that breakfast has almost always been something that has required zero or very little cooking.
The reason for this is pretty straightforward. When you wake up, it might be dark out, and without artificial light, it would be difficult to prepare a large meal—also, any cooking required starting a fire, which would take time and effort.
So, if you wanted something to eat just after you woke up in the morning, you probably wouldn’t have put much effort into it.
Going back thousands of years to ancient Egypt, a normal breakfast for common people included bread, beer, and onions. Meat or fish might be included for the wealthy.
So, if anyone looks at you weird for having your morning onion, just tell them you are having an Ancient Egyptian breakfast.
The ancient Greeks ate a very simple breakfast. A typical breakfast might include barley bread dipped in wine, accompanied by olives or figs. They also ate a kind of porridge called “maza” made from barley flour.
In Rome, breakfast, or “ientaculum” in Latin, was not universally consumed. It was often light, consisting of bread with cheese or olives, fruits like dates or figs, or leftovers from the previous day’s dinner. Sometimes, they drank wine or water.
There are reports of people eating it as early as 4 am and others which place it at around 10 am.
The Romans didn’t consider it central to their dining. It was a way for workers and soldiers to start their day, not something for the upper class.
As far as we can tell, the practices of the ancient cultures I just listed were very similar to those of other ancient cultures. During the Qin and early Han dynasties in ancient China, two meals per day were the norm, and if something was eaten in the morning, it would have been simple probably porridge.
It wasn’t until the Song Dynasty, about 1000 years ago, that three meals became the norm, and even then, the first meal was usually very simple.
In the Middle ages in Europe, breakfast was actively shunned. Some religious communities thought that eating early was a sin because it was a form of gluttony. They would simply fast until the midday meal.
Members of the nobility would just eat two meals a day because they would often have lengthy meals where they would conduct business.
During this time, eating in the morning was thought of as something for the weak, elderly, and poor or those who engaged in hard labor. When people did eat breakfast, it would almost never include meat. It was usually just bread, cheese, and ale.
Here, I should note the practice of breakfast in the Islamic world during Ramadan which arose during this period.
During the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, it is forbidden to eat during daylight hours. The meal that ends the fast is known as Iftar. Iftar almost always the biggest meal of the day during Ramadan and it will often be eaten with friends and family.
However, a meal is also eaten before the sun comes up, known as Suhoor.
What is eaten during Suhoor can vary from country to country, but it usually isn’t as big of a meal as the Iftar. It is just something to prepare you for the day of fasting ahead. The average Suhoor will often be simple and, like many breakfasts, will not require much preparation.
Attitudes toward breakfast in Europe began to change around the 15th century and the start of the Renaissance. Especially among the aristocracy, breakfast began to include more indulgent foods like meats, pies, and pastries for the wealthy.
Queen Elizabeth I of England was reported to enjoy beef stew in the morning.
In colonial America, breakfast was an important meal for settlers and farmers. A typical American colonial breakfast might include cornmeal porridge, bread with butter, and bacon or sausage. As food preservation improved, smoked or salted meats were often eaten.
Regional differences began to emerge. In New England, baked beans or Johnnycakes, a type of cornmeal flatbread, were common, while in the southern colonies, grits became a staple.
The biggest changes in breakfast, and the focus of the rest of this episode, took place in the United States and the United Kingdom.
One of the first major trends that encouraged breakfast was the adoption of tea. If you remember my tea episode, it exploded in popularity in Britain in the 18th century. When people enjoyed a morning cup of tea, it wasn’t a stretch to have something to eat with it.
Perhaps the biggest thing that turned breakfast from a light snack to a full-blown meal was the Industrial Revolution. As more people began to work in factories, the midday meal could no longer be the biggest meal of the day because they were at work. They could only have something simple, which usually didn’t require cooking. Basically, what breakfast had traditionally been.
You could, however, have a large meal at home before you went to work. Moreover, as stoves shifted from wood to coal as a heat source, cooking became easier and faster.
Breakfast exploded in popularity in the 19th century. Wealthy people during the Victorian Era often dedicated rooms of their homes to breakfast, and many wealthy Victorians made breakfast into a highly elaborate affair.
Pared-down versions of these breakfasts made their way to the working class. This eventually became the basis of the Full English breakfast, or just the full breakfast.
There is no set definition of a Full English breakfast. However, it often consists of a fried egg, bacon, sausage, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, with toast and hashbrowns.
Supposedly, Field Marshall Bernard Mongomery had a full breakfast every morning during the North Africa campaign in WWII, and it became known as the Full Monty.
There is also a Scottish variant of the breakfast with scones, haggis, or black pudding, aka blood sausage.
Whenever I’m somewhere that has a Full English breakfast, whether in Britain or somewhere that caters to British tourists, I always try to have at least one full breakfast. Despite the ingredients being easy to prepare and not hard to find, you will seldom see them available in the United States.
In the United States in the 19th century, breakfast evolved into something slightly different.
One of the foods that became a breakfast staple in the United States and Canada was flapjacks, aka pancakes. These were not invented in North America. In fact, versions of pancakes have existed for centuries. However, there was something that was introduced in North America that changed pancakes…..maple syrup.
Maple syrup was produced by native people who lived in Eastern North America, in what today would be New England, Ontario, and Quebec. Today, almost all the maple syrup in the world is produced in the US and Canada, 70% of which comes from the province of Quebec.
Maple syrup and pancakes found a natural paring. The lumberjack breakfast, which included pancakes with bacon and eggs, is believed to have first been served in a Vancouver Hotel in the 1870s.
Waffles were developed in France and Belgium. It is believed they were brought to North America by Dutch settlers, or possibly by the Pilgrims, who despite being English, came to North America from the Netherlands where they had been living.
Breakfast cereal is a rather recent invention, and it has a very odd backstory.
The origins of breakfast cereal begin with the health reform movements in the United States, particularly the temperance movement. The focus was on easy-to-digest, simple foods that were also seen as morally uplifting compared to the richer, meat-heavy diets of the time.
In 1863, Dr. James Caleb Jackson, a prominent health reformer, created the first manufactured breakfast cereal called “Granula” at the Jackson Sanatorium in Dansville, New York. It was made from dense bran nuggets that needed soaking overnight to be palatable.
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a devout Seventh-day Adventist and superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, created a similar product that he called Granula, but due to a legal challenge, he changed the name to granola.
In 1894, Kellogg accidentally discovered flaked cereal when he left some cooked wheat to sit and found it flaked when rolled. He and his brother applied this technique to corn, creating Corn Flakes, which they patented in 1896.
It was sold as a breakfast alternative to meat, which Kellogg thought evoked lustful appetites.
While breakfast cereal was new, it shared one thing in common with breakfasts that had been consumed for centuries: it required no cooking.
You might have heard the expression, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” This certainly wasn’t the belief for most of human history.
It actually came from a marketing campaign by Kellogg’s Corporation in 1917.
Breakfast cereals became a large market, with multiple companies all competing in the space. A major shift occurred after the Second World War when cereal manufacturers began to make cereals with highly refined flour and added sugar and sugar frostings.
Many cereals were marketed directly at children, often through Saturday morning cartoons.
The pairing of bacon and eggs is also a rather modern invention. Although people consumed both bacon and eggs for breakfast for a few centuries, they were never paired together as its own thing.
The pairing of bacon and eggs as a classic American breakfast is largely credited to a 1920s advertising campaign by Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations and the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He worked with a bacon company to promote bacon and eggs as a nutritious, hearty breakfast.
Throughout the 20th century, diners became known for serving breakfast and eventually, dedicated breakfast restaurants were established. In 1958, the International House of Pancakes was opened in California, which became a national chain known as iHOP.
In 1972, a McDonald’s franchisee in California named Herb Peterson started selling a new breakfast product known as an egg McMuffin. This was the start of fast-food restaurants offering breakfast, which eventually expanded into traditional breakfast foods such as pancakes, sausage, and eggs.
Innovation hasn’t stopped in breakfast. There are new products being released all the time with new foods such as avocado toast and breakfast burritos having found their way into the breakfast cannon.
Breakfast has also become a huge business. The global breakfast industry was estimated to be $398.1 billion in 2020, and is expected to almost double by the year 2030.
Breakfast has come a long way. Thousands of years ago, breakfast wasn’t even considered to be a full meal. It was, at best, a snack to start your day that didn’t require much cooking.
Today, it is a full-blown meal on an equal footing with lunch and dinner, and along the way, it has become a multibillion-dollar industry.
