What’s your reason for waking up in the morning? Is it the exciting and reassuring prospect of a fresh start with a brand new day? Do you look forward to morning’s stillness and the opportunity for quiet meditation and preparation? Perhaps you get out of bed in the morning because there is someone you love and you simply can’t wait any longer to talk to them. Or maybe you’re like me and you wake up because of breakfast.
Breakfast is irrefutably not only the most important, but also the best meal of the day, with the most delicious spread of foods. There’s bacon, eggs, sausage, hash browns. Then there’s also bacon, cereal, pancakes, waffles, bacon, syrup, french toast, bagels, muffins, oatmeal and finally bacon to name a few foods that fall into the “breakfast” category. My only problem with this meal is that societal norms—or maybe Gordon Ramsay—restrict us from eating it more than once a day.
Yes, on occasion we combine breakfast with lunch to create brunch, but even brunch is merely an excuse to sleep in and have breakfast food around lunchtime. Generally, this hybrid meal comes at the cost of skipping another meal, leaving the ‘bruncher’ hungry. There is also the even more rare amalgam of breakfast and dinner: the fabled ‘brinner.’ However, in my experience, ‘brinner’ is reserved for special occasions, like a birthday.
My question is, if breakfast is the most important meal of the day, why don’t we eat it two or three times a day? Riddle, nay, griddle me that. “Breakfast: The meal so nice it should be served thrice” would make a great bumper sticker.
Some people may argue that breakfast would become somehow less incredible if it were available three times a day. My retort: Bacon. Still others may claim that dinner is the winner amongst meals, but even a candlelit dinner doesn’t hold a candle to breakfast, unless, of course, it is a candlelit brinner.
This is not my way of saying that we should do away with lunch and dinner foods, rather that breakfast foods should be an option in addition to what is normally served in the afternoon and evening. The food choices at lunch are, for the most part, very similar to the choices at dinner, but both could not be more different from breakfast. Who would we be hurting by keeping eggs or pancakes on the menus all day? Am I wrong for wanting to wake up to the smell of bacon more than once a day? Of course, that would necessitate that I take a nap before both lunch and dinner, but hey, siestas are good for you. It’s a win-win.
Is anyone with me on this? If you think breakfast should be available all day, then let’s join forces and do something about it. We could call ourselves the Breakfast Club. First order of business is to watch that movie “The Breakfast Club” while we eat breakfast and overcome any differences we may have.
Perhaps someone will be a real nerd about breakfast nutrition facts, or someone else might be a rebel who just drowns everything in syrup. Maybe one of us will only be interested in protein intake at breakfast because he or she is an athlete. Of course, it is possible someone will be a real princess about breakfast, only wanting to eat fruit and some granola. One of us might be a total basket case and create the most twisted of breakfasts. However, it is my hope that we will all come to realize that we are not so different and that our distinct yet shared love of breakfast will bring us together and bring breakfast to the afternoon and the evening.