Why is bacon a breakfast food?

Factual Questions
1

In the United States, bacon is almost exclusively considered a topping: bacon bits on salad or potatoes, bacon slices on burgers, etc. Yet for breakfast, and only for breakfast in my experience, bacon is a side dish in its own right.

Milk and eggs as breakfast foods I can see. Cows make milk and chickens make eggs while farmers sleep, so there’s more likely to be a meal-sized surplus of fresh milk and eggs in the morning after that long night. You go to milk and eggs first thing in the morning and there’s plenty to go around.

But why bacon? It’s not as if you extract bacon from grunting, contented pigs first thing in the morning. Is a pig slaughtered and readied for the bacon slicer the night before, and… er… enbacons itself overnight?

Is bacon eaten by itself as a breakfast side dish, as in America, everywhere else in the world, or is this an American anomaly? Is there a country where they give you a plate of sliced bacon with lunch or dinner?

2

It may be exactly the reverse, in fact. As a smoked and preserved meat, bacon, like the other traditional breakfast meats in the US, ham and sausage, can be kept on hand all the time. Without refrigeration, other meats, such as beef or chicken, would be available only immediately after slaughtering an animal, and thus are more suitable for meals later in the day. Another traditional breakfast dish is corned beef hash, which is also made from preserved meat. An English breakfast often includes kippers, again an item that is preserved (in this case, in cans).

3

I am not sure if this question has a definitive answer, but I will venture a guess…

  • It is cheap.
  • It is a poor cut of meat not suitable as an entree.
  • It has a long storage life and therefore available most of the year (pre-fridge).
  • It creates large quantities of grease that can be used to cook the other staples of an American breakfast: eggs and hash browns.

The traditional UK breakfast also includes bacon or a bacon-like pork product.

4

Other traditional breakfast foods have similar rationales, or at least they made sense 100 years ago.

You eat toast, because you’re reusing slightly stale bread baked the day before.

You eat eggs because you go out to the coop first thing in the morning, gather the egss and cook them.

You eat quick breads like pancakes or biscuits because you don’t have to wait for the dough to rise, like in yeast breads.

You eat oatmeal or other porridge likewise…just boil the grain and serve. Maybe you’ve soaked the grain overnight too.

You drink coffee because of the caffiene.

You serve preserved fruit (jam), because it’s preserved.

You eat preserved meats, because they’re sitting on the pantry shelf. Ham, bacon, and sausage are/were salted and smoked and dried so they were shelf stable, so you wouldn’t need to slaughter and butcher an animal early in the morning.

Given the preserved meat above, you’ve probably got some rendered pork fat. Perfect for frying up some potatoes. So fried potatoes are traditional breakfast food, rather than mashed or boiled.

Or you eat bagels and lox and schmear, because you get the bagels fresh from the bakery on the ground floor of your Brooklyn tenement, and you’ve got smoked salmon in the icebox. You wouldn’t have fresh fish, because you’d need to go down the docks to get the catch of the day.

Pastries and doughnuts are the same…these are traditional for city dwellers, because the bakers who bake all night so we can have cake in the morn would make them, you buy them and bring a box back home.

So traditional American breakfast foods are those that could be prepared on a typical small farm fairly easily without a long preparation time, from easily gathered or preserved ingredients.

5

Not completely accurate.

Cows make milk pretty much continuously; you need to milk them at regular times during the day. And cows very much adapt to a routine; you need to follow a regular schedule to get the most milk. But that’s just as true for the 6pm milking as the 6am one; there’s no reason for breakfast to be special.

And during the night chickens sleep rather than lay eggs. Roosters waking the flock (and farmers) at daybreak with their crowing is well known. Normally, you gather eggs once or twice during the day. Doing it in the morning is just a convenient time for the farmer to do so.

6

So how do you explain orange juice?

7

I didn’t think I needed to be this explicit, but yes, I get that cows make milk all the time; it’s just that they go a longer time between dinner and breakfast (and have a larger bolus of milk stored up) than they go between, say, breakfast and lunch.

If you wanted fresh milk at lunch, there would be half as much milk available; you waited 6 hours between milking instead of 12 so there’s half the supply.

Then there’s the question of separating milk and cream, making cheese and butter, and which batch of milk you use for drinking and which for cheesing. But yes, cows make milk constantly; we just have a lot of drinkable milk in the morning so it has persisted as a breakfast side.

8

Bacon for breakfast is actually the result of one of a brilliant marketing campaign by Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and considered one of if not THE father of public relations.

see article

9

A related question: Breakfast meats, at least in my family, are usually pig based (bacon, pork sausage, ham) This also common in restaurant menus-- sure there is steak & eggs, but I rarely see chicken or fish (except maybe salmon) as a brteakfast meat. Is there a reason for this?

Brian

10

Eh, Orange juice doesn’t fit my theory. I’ll handwave it away by guessing that orange juice for breakfast is a very recent innovation, probably only since the 1950s have people expected fruit juice for breakfast.

After all, midwestern small town farms wouldn’t have any oranges for any purpose. Oranges and orange juice require shipping from California or Florida.

I think fresh fruit juice used to be pretty rare outside the tropics, because in temperate climates your fruit would all ripen at once, ususally in the fall. So you could get fresh apple juice only in the fall, any other time and you’d drink hard cider, juice that was pressed in the fall but hardened. And there was no way to preserve that juice except fermentation.

Hmmm. We see all kinds of fermented fruit juice…apple, pear, grape, cherry, date. Why no fermented orange juice?

11

Hogwash. It was standard fare in many US households and certainly earlier in Britain. He may have promoted the use as it says in that article. But “bacon for breakfast” was in like Flynn far earlier than Herr Bernays.

12

It certainly exists; here is a recipe for it.

The only place I’ve personally run across a locally-made commercial orange wine was Seville; I spent an evening with friends in a tapas bar (in the Barrio Santa Cruz, right near the cathedral) where it was the house wine.

13

Exactly. In fact, only since the 50s (when concentrate was developed) was OJ something other than a seasonal treat.

-rainy

14

As has been said before, bacon, ham, and sausage are the common preserved meats in the US. On a farm, neither chicken nor fish were likely to be available early in the day - one would have to be slaughtered, the other caught.

Here n Panama, besides bacon and sausage, a common breakfast meat in rural areas is tasajo, a kind of smoked beef rather like jerky.

However, another popular breakfast item here is fried liver, shooting the “preserved meat” theory all to hell.