We talk here in the USA sometimes about “three square meals a day.” While I think most think that’s the ideal, I suspect that most people don’t actually have only three meals a day.
Myself, I typically have 4 to 5 meals a day – breakfast, lunch, dinner, bedtime snack, plus sometimes a yogurt or fruit after my morning exercise class. I also have read that the tendency nowadays is for people to eat several smaller meals a day instead of 3 larger meals. (This is I think supported by the increase in packaged snacks increasingly available in grocery stores. Check out the cheese or meat and crackers/nuts/dried fruit combos in the lunchmeat section of your supermarket.)
How many meals does the typical USAn consume in a day?
What about other cultures? Do British people still have breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner? Or was this ever really the norm?
How about other European cultures? Asian cultures? South American? African? etc., etc.
The answer to that question takes us into IMHO territory. I distinguish between a “meal” and a “snack” (a yogurt or a piece of fruit would be the latter, not the former).
I think of a meal as something that
(1) Requires at least a little preparation or assembly (not necessarily done by the person eating it)
(2) Consists of more than one food item, or of a complex food item (like a sandwich) involving more than one food type/group
(3) Is accompanied by a beverage of some kind (if only water)
(4) Could be eaten by several people sitting down together.
This is not a formal definition, and I do not claim that the above criteria are either necessary or sufficient; but they’re what I think of when I think of “meals.”
I define a meal as something I eat at a fixed time each hday, more or less equal day-to-day in volume. Basically, that means breakfst, lunch and dinner. Evening snack almost every night, maybe another snack, like a handful of peanuts or a stalk of celery or a cookie, at unpredictable urges. Several hours after breakfast, a 9-am coffee with a little sweet pastry of some kind, but never at home, so that’s hit and miss according to opportunity. Except for the coffee break, I never have any beverage (not even water) with a meal.
I was raised in a mid-century household with fixed mealtimes, everybody eating together. Hard to break the habit.
I hadn’t thought about how to define a meal. Apparently it’s pretty individualized.
How about this instead:
How many times a day does the typical person eat?
Of those times, how often is the amount consumed in excess of 250 calories? (I’ve set 250 calories arbitrarily. I can easily be convinced another number is more appropriate.)
How many of the eating occasions include more than one food? My thinking here is that a large buttered popcorn at the movies would not be considered by most people to be a meal, but would be considerably over 250 calories. An egg and a piece of toast would I think likely be considered a meal by many, but contain fewer than 250 calories.
Still somewhat ambiguous, I know. I just don’t know how to phrase it to make it more objective.
Would it make sense to have “meal” be self-defined? That is, if people were asked how many meals they eat a day, and let each respondent define “meal,” what would the typical response be?
I’m from England and am confident that ‘elevenses’ and ‘afternoon tea’ was something only rich people did e.g. in Jeeves and Wooster stories.
You wouldn’t get that time off from your job.
I personally only eat two meals a day: lunch and dinner.
This was a thing I frequently encountered 20-30 years ago as advice from bodybuilding and supplement (which is key) peddlers. If anything I thought it was sort of on its way out. I see a lot of proponents of fewer meals, intermittent fasting, and attempts to debunk the benefits of the several small meals thing.
Personally, I rarely eat more than 2 full meals and since I cut out sugar and most processed foods I am not very hungry.
For me, more frequent eating causes hunger, which leads to overconsumption. I could eat three 1000 calorie meals, and consume at baseline. If I had to eat six 500 calorie meals, I would find it a lot easier to hit 550 or 600 or 700… multiplied.
I eat 6 meals a day when dieting for a bodybuilding competition. And for me personally this works fabulously well. Add in a gallon (or two) of water a day and the transformation begins.
When not training for a competition, I eat 4, sometimes 5 meals a day. This includes protein shakes/smoothies.
In my experience, the three meal format is pretty universal, but there is a lot of variation in which meal is the largest (lunch vs. dinner) and the timing of the last meal.
It makes sense. Breakfast and an evening meal are obvious, as most people will want to eat before and after entering a long period of sleep. So the question is really “how many meals do people typically eat between breakfast and dinner?” Given how labor intensive food prep was until modern times, one mid-day meal makes sense.
Years ago I worked at a place that stopped at 11am for tea and biscuits (in the UK). Tools down, someone makes the tea, and everyone sits in the common room area for a chat and a biscuit.
But otherwise, you’re right, no elevenses (officially) or afternoon tea (strictly for the Dowager Countess of Grantham). Plenty of people might grab a snack around those times, though.
Personally, like yourself, I eat two meals a day (lunch and dinner). No snacks. But then I’m on a permanent diet.
I have long joked that, since Tolkien seems to have based his races at least partially on different national stereotypes, the Hobbits may count a few Spanish fishermen among their ancestors. Of course the important bit is “when we can get them” - most people will have two or three meals a day (some have their first true meal as breakfast and some midmorning, depending on how early their stomachs wake up; lunch is usually the heaviest meal; dinner tends to be in-between), but I count names for seven.