Should we abandon the idea of ​​three meals a day? | books

‘Hey“One of the dumbest things in the serious-but-stupid school of culinary thought is that each of your three daily meals should be ‘balanced.’” So says American food writer M. F. K. Fisher in her 1942 book How to Cook Wolf. She continues: “First of all, not all people need or want three meals every day. Many of them feel better with two, one and a half, or five.”

Fisher wrote her book ostensibly as a guide on how to feed yourself pleasurably and nutritiously during a time of war-induced food shortages, but there is much in her insightful advice to inspire and provoke us today. More than 80 years later, threats to the sacred style of eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner can still make the news: “A nation of snackers: Britons no longer eat three meals a day,” read a recent headline in The Times. Deviations from the “standard” model are the subject of research by academics and health professionals, and food retailers conduct studies in an attempt to understand (and shape?) when and how customers consume their food.

The idea that we should sit down to three meals at about the same time every day has become such a fundamental part of the way we organize our lives – even when we fail to do so – that we forget that this is not the natural order of things. Instead, it is a system that was not created to serve the needs of our bodies or to give us pleasure, no matter how much we can adapt it for those purposes – but to fit into a workday. Like many of the ways we live now, it has its roots in the Industrial Revolution: breakfast became a short meal eaten before the morning of work, lunch something light but fortifying to be eaten quickly on the days before pay breaks, and dinner a final sitting when everyone was done for the evening. Before that, people ate meals, of course, but they were made up of different foods, and historically they got the timing wrong.

Industry-mandated strict eating schedules have in turn created opportunities for business tycoons to shape our tastes and behaviors, including John Harvey Kellogg, who did much to influence breakfast as we know it. He and fellow members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church established sanitariums in the United States in the late 19th century as part of the “healthy living” movement, and it was here that the promotion of savory breakfast foods such as cereals — “pale pancakes made of wheat,” as Fisher put it — became associated with teachings of moral rightness. This light breakfast was also beneficial to employers who did not want their workers to fill up on tasty food because it was thought to make them sluggish. A century or so later, the entrepreneurs behind the ubiquitous packaged sandwiches created the conditions that enabled industry leaders like Alan Sugar to boast that his employees’ lunch, if anything, was “a sandwich dangling on their desks” while they worked.

There is growing evidence that our eating habits are evolving away from the three-meal model, driven by pandemic lockdowns as well as the changing shape of our households, including a rise in singletons like me. However, those who emphasize, for example, the value of family dinners for children’s overall physical and mental health still cling to the ideal of the sit-down meal. Such concerns and their implicit demands, says nutritionist Laura Thomas, almost always fall on women, especially working-class women.

Viewed in the context of the physical realities of our lives, prescriptive models about when and what we should eat — from counting calories to meal times to breakfast being the most important meal of the day — can cause shame and guilt, as time-pressed women feel like they’re failing because of the difficulty of organizing it all. The academic Anne Murcutt, writing of the modern ‘cooked dinner’, has come to represent ‘a typical, even regulated, domestic life’. The expectations you set can be harmful in other ways too, leading to anxiety and eating disorders. I know myself during a period of poor mental health that the pressures of the first meal of the day would sometimes become so unbearable that I would find myself cowering in bed, paralyzed with indecision. Some of this stemmed from feeling that my failure to eat a balanced breakfast reflected something bigger about myself, which was that I was failing at life in general.

Fisher paints an attractive picture of the alternative to focusing on structure and balance: “The best answer…is to have such good food and such generous bowls and bowls and plates, that there cannot be even a conditioned appetite for more, after the real sensual appetite has been satisfied.” You can see traces of this in contemporary ideas of “intuitive eating,” an approach that has emerged as a reaction to punitive diet cultures, which encourage abandoning the concept of “forbidden foods” or “bad foods” and incorporating eating habits seen as transgressive, including snacking. The problem is that the responsibility for providing food, whether a full meal or a snack, still falls largely to women, and “food work” is still unevenly distributed based on gender in households.

How does one locate one’s “true sensory” appetite and abandon such entrenched ideas about “good” and “bad” foods anyway? Any new theory of eating that fails to deal with the reality of people’s lives and the circumstances in which they eat and prepare food is unlikely to make sense or take hold. Maybe the answer He can It lies partly in snacks, a form of food that was used to supplement meals before the industrial workday. A really good snack, says author Laura Goodman, can take some of the pressure off family dinners and encourage spontaneous, intuitive enjoyment of eating. Delicious morsels eaten when we want them: perhaps a small way to start loosening the grip of three square meals.

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

Further reading

The Joy of Snacking by Laura Goodman (Home title, £12.99)

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

Sarcasm by Pen Vogler (Atlantic, £10.99)