Fuel For Punctuation

Newcastle Herald

Friday June 6, 2008

Jeff Corbett

IN the morning I eat breakfast, mid-morning I have fruit, lunchtime I have lunch and at night I have dinner, and for decades I didn't question it.

I didn't always eat as regularly as I do now when I was young and single, and when I was travelling, meals happened when meals happened, but always I had a vague sense that I'd missed a meal if I skipped one of the three. Since those days I've been caught up in my wife's organising of the children's three meals a day.

We both insist our children eat breakfast because, we must have said a thousand times, it's the most important meal of the day, and we warn dieting daughters that missing breakfast will cause them to put on weight, not lose it. We say these things because that seems to have been the accepted wisdom, but I'm beginning to have my doubts.

Like many others I exercise before breakfast most days, and sometimes cycle up to 70 kilometres on nothing more than half-a-litre of water, and I'm none the worse for not having broken the fast when I arose. And I've noticed in my travels in Australia and overseas that many farm workers start early without breakfast and eat some hours later.

So who says we should have breakfast or, even, three meals a day?

Given our dominant national background, the Poms probably. Although it struck me when I was there that the English, or at least the middle-class English, eat more often and much more than we do.

They'd be deprived if they didn't have a cooked breakfast that included meat and eggs. Morning tea always seemed to include more cake and biscuits than most Australians would eat in a week. Lunch was heated leftovers from dinner or a cooked meal in the workplace canteen or nearby pub having a sandwich was "making do today". More cake and biscuits for afternoon tea. Dinner was at least two courses, with a cheese plate to follow. Then there'd be a supper shortly before bedtime.

I was always amazed that the English weren't universally obese.

By comparison Australians eat sparingly. If we eat breakfast it is cereal or toast, morning tea is a cuppa and two biscuits, lunch is a sandwich, afternoon tea is confined to public servants, and dinner at home never includes an entree (unless you're a Pom). Even pudding, or sweets if you have a stiff little finger, is no longer mandatory. And a cheese plate? A one-kilogram block of Mainland on a plate?

As you know, people of different nationalities order their eating differently. Asian people tend to have more and smaller meals, and many Latin people have lunch as the day's main meal and a siesta afterwards. Americans eat all the time.

It seems that our custom of three meals a day began in the early 1800s in England, where such order was seen as indicating a civilised existence.

I wonder if the three-meals-a-day pattern today might do us more harm than good. I don't think many of us need to eat so often even if and when we exercise strenuously. On day-long bicycle rides of 100 kilometres or more, for example, I often have only two meals, an early lunch and dinner.

And I suspect that often we eat at certain times because it has become our custom to eat at those times or because eating is part of the break.

We eat breakfast because that's our routine, we eat morning tea because that's part of the break, we eat lunch of a certain size without questioning it much like the cues that prompt smokers to light up.

I reckon we should reorder our meals, and I think of how my youngest son's primary school moved play lunch from the morning to the afternoon, when it said children needed a refresher, and brought lunch forward with great success.

Meals are about punctuating the day as much as they are about fuelling us. So how's this: Coffee on the run for breakfast (a la the French and Italians); lunch at the time of our current morning break, about 10.30; fruit and half-an-hour mid-afternoon break; dinner as usual?

Blog with Jeff @ www.theherald.com.au

Yes, let's set a new eating order for our Australian day. What's your plan?

jcorbett@theherald.com.au

© 2008 Newcastle Herald

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