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Beer Soup for Breakfast and Corn Flakes instead of Sex
A history behind the way Americans eat in the mornings......
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American breakfast begins in Europe, which provided the food norms imported by early colonizers. There, the day’s first meal had emerged from centuries of prohibition under the Catholic Church. “There was a period of time in England and western Europe where eating breakfast was sort of tied to gluttony,” says Heather Arndt Anderson, the author of Breakfast: A History. That all changed with the Protestant Reformation, when morning sustenance became more broadly permissible, if not all that exciting, or even distinct from everything else people ate. Lack of refrigeration meant the meal was usually sour and tepid. In Germany, beer soup was common.
In early America, breakfast remained a matter of convenience for most people: bread; preserved meats; repurposed leftovers; and things, like eggs, that were easy to prepare and regularly available to rural families, Arndt Anderson says.
According to Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at New York University, that’s consistent with how much of the world still approaches the day’s first meal. “Poorer people everywhere, especially in places like India and China, eat the same kind of food for meal after meal,” he says. “The strict differentiation of meals is partly an American thing, but partly a thing of upward mobility.” Breakfast food, as a concept, is a luxury. As colonial America developed into a more robust culture with distinct class markers, breakfast started to change with it.
The alarm with which Americans now commonly regard eating day-old, unrefrigerated food started to develop as the Industrial Revolution changed food preservation, the workday, and cultural conceptions of health. Arguably no one was more directly responsible for these shifts than the Kellogg brothers, who developed Corn Flakes in the late 1800s as an outgrowth of John Harvey Kellogg’s work at his Battle Creek Sanitarium, in Michigan. Kellogg was a doctor and an adherent of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which advocated a bland, vegetarian diet and abstention from things like caffeine and alcohol.
Although historical tellings tend to emphasize that Corn Flakes were designed to steer people away from sexual thoughts, Arndt Anderson says they also served other Adventist aims. “It was tied to the health benefits of having a little grain to get your morning constitutional,” she says. Kellogg was “really interested in getting people to poop.”
More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/what-is-breakfast/589411/
********* I can't help but notice that organized religion tried to rule even what people ate in years gone by! Ugh
12 replies
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There's a saying that the British don't break fast. They SHATTER fast. And I can attest to it. On my earlier trips to the UK, we would stay at Bed and Breakfast places, off the main roads. This is the sort of breakfast we'd be served. We'd always look for places that advertised serving a "Full English" for breakfast. Sometimes we'd set the bread and sliced meats aside, and use them to make sandwiches, for lunch. The only thing missing from this picture is a bowl of cold cereal.
The landlords at one B&B in Llandudno, North Wales, were surprised that, every morning, I'd ask for the full breakfast - black pudding, and all. They said very few Americans are quite that adventurous, when it came to their morning meal.
