Should we ditch the idea of three meals a day?

8 hours ago 2

‘One of the stupidest things in an earnest but stupid school of culinary thought is that each of the three daily meals should be ‘balanced’.” So argues American food writer MFK Fisher in her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf. She goes on: “In the first place not all people need or want three meals each day. Many of them feel better with two or one and one-half, or five.”

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

The idea that we should sit down for three meals at roughly the same time every day has become such an essential part of how we organise our lives – even when we’re failing to do it – that we forget it isn’t the natural order of things. Instead, it is a regime that was created not to serve the needs of our bodies or to give us pleasure, however much we may have managed to adapt it for these purposes – but to fit in with a day of labour. Like many of the ways that we live now, it has its roots in the Industrial Revolution: that was when breakfast became a brief meal eaten before the working morning, lunch something light but fortifying to be wolfed down quickly in the days before breaks were paid, and dinner a final sitting when everybody had finished in the evening. Before this people had of course eaten meals but they were made up of different foods and historically slipped around in terms of timing.

Rigid industry-dictated slots for eating in turn created opportunities for tycoons to mould our tastes and behaviours, including John Harvey Kellogg, who did much to influence breakfast as we know it. He and fellow members of the Seventh-day Adventist church set up sanatoriums in the US in the late 19th century as part of the “healthy living” movement and it was here that the promotion of bland breakfasts like cereal – “a pale pabulum made of wheat”, as Fisher had it – became linked with teachings on moral correctness. This lighter breakfast was also handy for employers who didn’t want their workers full on hearty food as it was thought to make them sluggish. A century or so later the entrepreneurs behind the now ubiquitous pre-packaged sandwich created the conditions for captains of industry like Alan Sugar to boast about how lunch for his staff, if anything, was a “sandwich slung on their desk” as they worked.

There is increasing evidence that our eating habits are evolving away from the three meals paradigm, though, spurred by the pandemic lockdowns as well as the changing shape of our households, including a rise in solo dwellers like me. Nevertheless, the ideal of the sit-down meal continues to be maintained by those who assert, for example, the value of family dinners for children’s overall physical and mental wellbeing. Such concerns and their implicit demands are, as nutritionist Laura Thomas argues, almost always laid at the feet of women, particularly working-class women.

Seen in the context of the material realities of our lives, prescriptive models of when and what we should eat – from calorie-counting to mealtimes to breakfast being the most important meal of the day – can cause shame and guilt, with time-pressured women feeling like failures because of the difficulty of orchestrating it all. The academic Anne Murcott writes, of the modern “cooked dinner”, that it came to represent a “typical, even orderly, domestic life”. The expectations it sets up can be harmful in other ways too, prompting anxiety and disordered eating. I know myself from a period of poor mental health that the pressures created by the first meal of the day became at times so unbearable that I would find myself cowering in bed, crippled by indecision. Some of this stemmed from the feeling that my failure to consume a balanced breakfast reflected something bigger about myself – that I was failing at life more generally.

Fisher paints an appealing picture of the alternative to fixations on structure and balance: “The best answer … is to have such good food and such generous casseroles and bowls and platters of it, that there cannot be even a conditioned appetite for more, after the real sensuous one is satisfied.” You can see traces of this in contemporary ideas of “intuitive eating”, an approach that emerged in reaction to punitive dieting cultures, which encourages letting go of the concept of “forbidden” or “bad foods” and incorporating eating habits otherwise seen as transgressive, including snacking. The problem is that the responsibility to provide food, be it a full meal or a snack, continues overwhelmingly to fall on women, and “foodwork” is still distributed unevenly along gendered lines in households.

And how does one go about locating one’s “real sensuous” appetite and letting go of such deeply entrenched ideas of “good” and “bad” foods anyway? Any new theory of eating that fails to engage with the realities of people’s lives and the conditions in which they’re eating and preparing food is unlikely to make sense or take hold. Perhaps the answer can lie partly in the snack, a form of food which was used to supplement meals before the industrial working day took over. A really good snack, as writer Laura Goodman argues, can dispel some of the pressure of the family dinner and encourage spontaneous and intuitive pleasure in eating. Delicious morsels eaten as and when we feel like it: perhaps a small way to begin loosening the hold of three square meals.

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