“I think that the breakfast table is one place where you see the most blatant demonstrations of this human tendency to tie what one eats to who one is,” says Arndt Anderson. Unlike lunch and dinner, there is something about the meal that lends itself to judgment. It’s not just the moralization that got caught up with breakfast that has changed how we see it, says Arndt Anderson. Dinner and lunch somehow never got the same treatment, and our adherence to the same narrow category of breakfast foods continues unabated. Today, we are still mostly eating foods like cereals, bacon and eggs, rolls, bagels and croissants for breakfast. That brought bacon and eggs back into fashion and added more weight to the idea that breakfast was not only very important but medically recommended. He then got newspapers to publish the results of his petition as if it was a scientific study, explains Carroll. A public relations expert working for the Beech-Nut company, Edward Bernays, whose other claim to fame was being the nephew of Sigmund Freud, exploited all the moralization and health fears around breakfast to help the company push its bacon.īernays got a doctor to agree that a protein-rich, heavy breakfast of bacon and eggs was healthier than a light breakfast, and then sent that statement to around 5,000 doctors for their signatures. It was a combination of fear of indigestion, religious moralization and advertising that helped push the idea of breakfast as the most important meal of the day – but it was a campaign to sell more bacon that really solidified the idea. Maternal guilt was used to market cereal as the best food to give to children, and underline the importance of eating breakfast. It was also around that time that women were entering the workforce in droves during the war, and needed something quick yet nutritious to feed the kids in the morning. The cliche that breakfast is the most important meal – and one with very specific food groups – developed from those early days of cereal.Īfter vitamins were discovered, it did not take long before, in the 1940s, breakfast cereals were fortified and heralded as a source of every vitamin under the sun, making breakfast that much more important, according to advertisements at the time. In the early 20th century, the idea that if you ate a lighter, healthier breakfast you were going to be more efficient and productive at work added “another moralizing layer”, according to Carroll. That moralization wasn’t just around religion and health: it also incorporated our reverence for hard work. Using moralizing rhetoric to sell the idea of a healthy breakfast in the 19th century changed how people thought about the meal, says Carroll. Both Jackson and Kellogg were early Seventh-day Adventists, further tying a sense of religious morality into their ideas around the importance of healthy eating. Jackson was a preacher, and Kellogg a religious man who believed that masturbation was the greatest evil, which bland, healthy foods like corn flakes could prevent. The first cereal, invented by James Caleb Jackson, and the better known Kellogg’s brand, invented by John Harvey Kellogg, were both born at sanatoriums. These religious health gurus opened sanatoriums and introduced people to vegetarian diets and eating bland, whole wheat as a way to counter ill health. It was around this time, in the middle of a general healthier living fad, that breakfast cereals got their start at sanatoriums founded by followers of the newly formed Seventh-day Adventist religion. Heavy farm breakfasts before work got the blame for indigestion, a major preoccupation at the time, and a lighter version became the ideal. In the late 19th century, however, people began to worry about indigestion as the Industrial Revolution saw people move from farm labor to factories and offices, where a lot of their time was spent sitting or standing in one place. Chicken was never a breakfast food, points out Arndt, as no one is going to kill a chicken first thing in the morning, but cured meat from a pig that was previously slaughtered could be. Meat that did not have to be slaughtered that day and could keep was also incorporated. Chickens lay eggs in the morning, and egg dishes are easy and fast to prepare. By the 1800s, what Americans think of as a farmer’s breakfast started showing up at the table.Įggs have always been a popular breakfast food, says Heather Arndt Anderson, author of Breakfast: A History.
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