Should we give up the idea of ​​three meals a day? | | Books

‘OhOne of the most stupid things in the well-educated but stupid school is that every three meals a day should be ‘sufficient’. So argues American food writer MFK Fisher in his 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf. He continues: “In the beginning not all people need or want three meals a day. Most of them feel good with two or one and a half, or five.”

Fisher wrote his book ostensibly as a guide to how to eat deliciously and healthily during wartime famine, but there is much in his wise advice to inspire and enrage us today. More than 80 years later, the threat of the sacred breakfast-lunch-dinner can still be felt: “Many types: Britons no longer eat three times a day”, puzzled a recent headline in the Times. Deviations from the “standard” model are the subject of research students and health professionals, and food retailers send studies in an attempt to understand (and shape?) when and how customers eat their food.

The idea that we should sit down to three meals at the same time every day has become such an important part of how we plan our lives – even when we can’t do it – that we forget it’s not natural. In fact, it is a regime that was created not to serve the needs of our bodies or to give us pleasure, regardless of whether we can change it for these reasons – but to fit into the working day. Like many of the ways we live now, it comes from the Industrial Revolution: it was when breakfast became a short meal eaten in the morning of work, lunch something light but encouraging to quickly disappear in the days off before being served, and the last dinner when everyone had finished the evening. Before this, people did eat food but it was made up of different foods and history slips through time.

The strict levels of scrutiny by the food industry have given tycoons the opportunity to shape our tastes and habits, including John Harvey Kellogg, who did much to influence breakfast as we know it. He and his colleagues in the Seventh-day Adventist church established hospitals in the US in the late 1900s as part of the “healthy lifestyle” and it was there that the promotion of breakfast food like corn – “pale pabulum made of wheat”, as Fisher had it – became compatible with moral teachings. This light breakfast was also useful for employers who did not want their employees to fill up on tasty food because they thought it would make them lazy. A century or so ago, the entrepreneurs behind the now famous pre-packaged sandwich created the characteristics of corporate executives like. Alan Sugar to brag how his employees’ lunch, if any, was “a sandwich hanging on their desk” while they worked.

There is increasing evidence that our diet is based on these three foods, however, fueled by pandemic lockdowns and changes in our families, including the rise of private households like me. However, the benefits of sit-down meals are still maintained by those who claim, for example, the importance of family dinners for children’s mental and physical health. Such concerns are their real needs, according to nutritionist Laura Thomas they objecthe almost always slept at the feet of women, especially working women.

Seen in the physical reality of our lives, examples of when and what we should eat – from counting calories until breakfast time is the most important meal of the day – it can lead to shame and guilt, and women who have time to feel like a failure because of the difficulty of making it all. An academic Anne Murcott he writes, referring to the modern “cooked meal”, that it came to represent “a stable, even orderly, domestic life”. Expectations can be harmful in other ways as well, leading to anxiety and disordered eating. I myself know from a time of mental illness that the pressures of the first meal of the day became so unbearable at times that I found myself cowering in bed, crippled by indecision. Part of this stems from the feeling that my failure to eat a healthy breakfast reflects something bigger about myself – that I’m failing in life in general.

Fisher gives an interesting picture of the place of planning and organizing: “The best solution … is to have such a good meal with generous casseroles and plates and dishes, that there will be no desire for more, after the real desire is gone.” You can see this in today’s concept of “natural eating”, the way it is appeared due to punitive cultureswhich encourages abandoning the concept of “forbidden” or “bad foods” and includes foods that are considered harmful, including eating. The problem is that the responsibility to provide food, whether a full meal or a snack, they continue to fall heavily on womenand “food work” is still unevenly distributed along gender lines within households.

And how can a person find his “true desire” and let go of such deep thoughts of “good” and “bad” foods? A new concept of eating that does not correspond to the reality of people’s lives and the way they eat and prepare food will not make sense or take hold. Maybe the answer he can sleep a little in a cold snack, the shape of food used to supplement food before the industrial working day. The best food, as author Laura Goodman arguesit can take some of the stress out of family dinners and encourage spontaneous and natural joy in eating. Delicious food is eaten as we like it: maybe a small way to start freeing the three-part food.

Eli Davies is the author of The Spinster Cookbook (Indigo)

Another reading

The Joy of Snacking by Laura Goodman (Head House, £12.99)

How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher (Daunt, £10.99)

Insults by Pen Vogler (Atlantic, £10.99)