Why do we categorize food by when we eat it?

I truly do believe this is why some restaurants, like Cracker Barrel and Waffle House, were invented.

To give equal rights to breakfast foods at anytime, any day, any hour,

I am an equal opportunity consumer.
I do not discriminate based on class or food group.
C’mon over for dinner!
We’re having Capn’ Crunch ;)
@john- XD

This is question is not about whether or not you follow these norms, but why they started in the first place, and why most people still follow them.

I read awhile back that bacon and eggs became a breakfast food as the result of a marketing campaign. Bacon producers hired Edward Bernays to expand the market for their product. Bacon had been mostly a dinner food, so Bernays tried to figure out how to get Americans to eat it at breakfast as well. He found a nutritional expert to endorse the claim that eating a substantial, high-protein breakfast is good for the health (even though that was not actually a widely accepted medical view at the time), and he used this as the basis for selling the “bacon and eggs for breakfast” idea. Up til then, even eggs weren’t typically a breakfast food. Most Americans had coffee or tea and toast for breakfast.

Aside from that odd little bit of manipulation, practical factors enter into it. We like stuff like cereal and toast at breakfast because we don’t want to mess with complicated preparation and cleanup first thing in the morning. Many lunch foods got to be lunch foods because they were easy to carry in lunch pails and eat without further preparation.

Exactly, if I want m&m sandwiches for breakfast then by gum i’m going to have m&m sandwiches for my brekkie. Washed down with a flaggon of ale at that.

I absolutely love breakfast for dinner.

OK, that was all I was moved to say, but to actually answer your question about why, I think it is just customary. Some foods become customary to eat at a certain meal and then become breakfast foods or lunch foods.

I, for example, don’t really like sandwiches. They are not my preferred lunch food at all.

Read. The. Question.

i.e. I don’t care if you eat breakfast food for dinner, that’s not what I’m asking.

That’s something I’ve never understood- the categories according to time of day. I’m glad you asked this, because maybe someone will have an answer for it and clear up my confusion.

I’m 43 years old and every day I am still giddily pleased by the revelation that I can eat anything I want at any time. Yesterday I had frozen yoghurt with strawberry jam and a dessert of popcorn for “breakfast.” I felt naughty and rebellious the whole time. The simple answer to your question is, most people do it because their parents did it, and they are conditioned from the instant they’re born that defying authority is wrong and bad. It’s as simple as that. Their parents ate bacon and eggs for breakfast, so they do too. No conscious thought, no existential choices required. Baaaaahhhh…

Interesting.

My grandparents always ate their large meal at lunchtime and that was because their schedule was more along the lines of farming. Grandpa could use a good break in the middle of the day and sustenance to keep him going through the afternoon. He got in late and didn’t want a lot to eat so close to bedtime. I’m inclined to believe the change has to do with our work schedules.

We usually don’t have much time for breakfast so we grab something quick. When we have the time to linger over breakfast, rich foods that smell strong seem to be popular – maybe to entice use to wake up?

Lunch hours are usually an hour or less. That isn’t time to go home and make a large meal or, really, to go out for something that cannot be prepared and served in a reasonable amount of time.

The evenings are when we have time to put effort into a larger meal and time to clean up after it.

@JOE—WTFC? ;)

@lucillelucillelucille Me. I asked the question.

No idea, but it’s most likely rooted in tradition. I hate it personally because I’ve had people say things like “pasta for breakfast?!” and I’m like “yeah, instead of fatty greasy bacon and eggs and other shit that I don’t like.” :P

One reason is time. It takes time to roast meat, bake bread, pick, clean, chop vegetables.

As @thorninmud stated…Time and marketing.

People categorize things in whatever way they find useful. It is possible to have multiple ways of categorizing any given set of things. People categorize by time because that’s how they think of it. You can categorize in some other way that is useful to you.

I was thinking that on the farm, we used to get the eggs in the morning, and the bread was cooled by morning, after being baked the night before. So, eggs and toast for breakfast. As @faye says, the other foods take a lot of time.

It seems, to me, to also be determined by our actual metabolisms as well. Apparently having five smaller meals a day is better than a big lunch and dinner, but do any of us have time to do that? So in the morning after we’ve been fasting while asleep, a small lighter breakfast (eg cereal) is just enough to get our metabolism going (I heard, and I guess it makes sense, that you actually put on weight rather than lose it if you don’t eat breakfast at all) then you have a bigger lunch because your metabolism is up and running and it doesn’t make you feel sick to eat a bit more, then you have a big dinner because you have all night to digest and metabolise while you sleep. I think metabolise is the right word. Maybe it’s just “digest”. Anyway. I feel sick after a big breakfast in the morning so that’s what I think.