Inspired by my four year old wondering why he couldn’t have mac and cheese for breakfast: Most (all?) cultures have certain foods that only get eaten in the morning and certain foods that only get eaten in the evening, outside of special occasions and IHOP. When did this come to be? Did Grog criticize Ogg for eating woolly mammoth in the morning instead of dodo eggs?
Would you rather digest a big pile of mac and cheese early in the morning, or a black coffee and half a croissant? More factually, this has to do with work patterns where, for example, peasants would have a big dinner around midday (after working all morning). It is going to be different if one is sledging across the Antarctic (Shackleton wrote, “Breakfast at 8 a.m. consisted of a pannikin of hot hoosh made from Bovril sledging ration, two biscuits and some lumps of sugar. Lunch came at 1 p.m. and comprised Bovril sledging ration, eaten raw, and a pannikin of hot milk… Tea, at 5 p.m. had the same menu…”—it is not like there was much of a menu to pick from, in which case you eat whatever you can get.)
Associating foods with specific times is not a worldwide phenomenon and is limited to only certain parts of the world. In several parts of Asia, you can eat the same food for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
When trekking in Nepal we would see the porters eating dal bhat (rice and lentils) every meal, but they typically only ate two meals a day.
I can confirm that in Korea. Breakfast typically is the same rice & kimchi, plus soup as the rest of the day’s meals.
I think part of it is practical, in the morning one would typically want a quick and easy food to make, one that one can have on hand and perhaps be eaten without cooking. Some sort of bigger meal would require time to prepare and make thus later in the day.
Historically, grains, vegetables, and legumes have always been staples of the masses. Soups and stews were primarily cheap ways of stretching luxuries like meat. Cheese and butter were (and still are) used to preserve the protein of dairy products.
In Western traditions, breakfast was usually bread or leftovers from the previous evening’s meal. Ale, beer, and wine were common beverages.
Coffee and tea drinking became popular with European expansion.
Specialized breakfast foods like processed cereals didn’t become common until the turn of the 20th century. The same is true for foods like hot dogs, hamburgers, and French fries that made cheap, quick meals for industrial workers.
The History Channel has a pretty good series about the evolution of food and the food industry in the US from the post–Civil War period to the present. It’s been one of the few really bright spots on their schedule for a couple of years now.
Blame it on the Industrial Revolution.
Here in Switzerland, the famous Birchermüesli is often eaten for lunch or dinner as well. Breakfast is usually something easy to make, so pancakes, which don’t need yeast, fit the bill, as does french toast.
That’s an excellent article covering a lot of information in a fairly small space.
Another thing that should be considered is the technology of food preservation. Until the early 19th century, you had drying, smoking, and salting, and that was about it. Canning wasn’t invented until Napoleon, who had trouble keeping his army fed, offered a prize to anyone who could come up with a new way of keeping food fresh.
Refrigeration was invented mid-19th century; flash-freezing, in the early 20th.
The technology for processing food was developed starting in the late 19th century. Before that, you basically had grinding, milling, and brewing.
As foods became more varied and available (due also to improvements in agriculture and animal husbandry), it was natural that our dietary habits would change.
As a kid, I always loved it when Mom made breakfast for dinner. I still order eggs, hashbrowns and sausage when traveling, no matter what time of day.
Yes, I always liked finishing an evening out with a trip to Denny’s for a Grand Slam and a piece of pie.
A tradition I embrace in the form of cold pizza for breakfast!
Make sure to collect all the beer from the almost empty bottles too. Ale at breakfast has a long tradition in Europe / UK and the early USA. 
Yes, the US was a nation of drunkards until the coming of railroads made easier for farmers to get their produce to market instead of turning it into alcohol locally. You would have been introduced to hard cider by the time you were five. Planters like George Washington always had their own warehouses full of whisky made from surplus grain. Plus, it was usually safer to drink hooch than water because of things like dysentery and cholera.
Distillation and fermentation were important ways of processing food, fer sure!
I watched a TV show on I think one of the foodie channels a few years ago which was a 30-something British presenter couple whose schtick was evidently doing various travelogue re-enactments of period life in Merrye Olde Britain. I only saw one episode of them, but it was memorable.
For this episode they agreed to eat and drink the diet of, say, 1600s - 1700s upper-crust English landed gentry or wealthy merchant class for a month. In suitably posh antique surroundings with butlers, footmen, and all the rest. And dressed accordingly. So not royalty, not elaborate banquets and parties, just the daily fare of the equivalent of modern millionaires.
The diet was pretty much meat and beer and bread 3 meals a day. Squab and beer for breakfast. Codfish and beer for lunch. Boar or beef with blood gravy and potatoes and beer for dinner. etc. With different beer between meals as the other beverage. A bit of potatoes here and there and the occasional bit of boiled soggy veggies. Lots and lots of scary-sounding (and -looking) stuff made from the parts of critters we now feed to pigs.
Meantime a doctor monitored their weight and cardio situation and became very dramatically alarmed as the “experiment” continued.
It was played for some humour but was also meant as a serious look at how people not that many generations ago had to eat given the food preservation tech of the day. And this was the wealthy in a highly “civilized” country of the time. They talked a bit of how the servants would have eaten and the whole thing was pretty grim. As one might expect, how the truly poor ate wasn’t addressed. Since they mostly didn’t.
Sorry I can’t remember anything about the name of the show, the names of the presenters, or the channel it aired on. I’d sure recognize it anyone else locates a similar candidate show from this poor description
Well, it does take a lot longer to roast a woolly mammoth than to fry up some dodo eggs.
The very first SDMB thread I ever started was along the same lines as this one:
I know the series you are talking about, can’t remember the name. I watched the Romans and the Medieval ones and about threw my TV out the window from the inacuracies of those two eras. I would have to find it and rewatch it to tell you exactly what they got wrong in both eras, but I can freaking tell you the menu you mention for whatever era that is is freaking wrong. If frex it is 1600, for food of the upper middle [what it sounds like they are portraying] I would encourage you to check out The Good Huswifes Jewel.
Very loosely and very broadly, you don’t want breakfast food to take up a lot of preparation time. You certainly don’t want to boil the pasta, grate the cheese, make the bechamel sauce with flour and butter and milk and melt the cheese in it, pour it over the pasta, and then bake it for over half an hour. Now, in the modern universe, pulling the leftover mac-and-cheese out and nuking it in the microwave oven, that isn’t time-consuming; neither is opening a can of franco-american macaroni & cheese and heating it. But we didn’t always have microwave ovens, and while canned foods have been around for awhile longer, they’re a bit expensive for what you get. Eggs have tended to be cheap, they cook fast, and they stick to you (protein and probably some oil if fried and/or accompanied by bacon or sausage, also oil and protein from cheese if there’s cheese); and bacon and sausage themselves are a fast-to-cook item.
The Supersizers.
The Supersizers... - Wikipedia…
The whole series is on Youtube. They are quite entertaining, especially the doctor evaluations after the exercise.
On a personal note, I am quite happy eating lunch for breakfast. Hey, McDonalds! Screw “All Day Breakfast.” I want to be able to get a Big Mac at 6am!
That is them. Thank you.
I’m not going to bother hunting up the particular episode on YouTube, but the wiki list of episodes offers a few good candidates. At least they’re clearly named to denote the approximate timeframe.
Of course now I wonder how well I’ve remembered the timeframe and other details alid out in my earlier post. Ref @aruvqan 's cogent critique, maybe the episode was set more in the early 1800s, before safe drinking water, but not quite so primitive as the 1600s.