The Most Important Meal of the Day

I love a good old-fashioned breakfast.  I’m talking 3-egg omelets stuffed with an orgy of cheese, veggies and meats.  Pancakes and waffles smothered in maple or fruit-based syrups.  Toast swimming in butter.  Hash browns covered in paprika in a desperate attempt to make them appealing.  And no old-fashioned breakfast would be complete without bacon and sausage.  Unlike other meals that force them to share the spotlight with burgers or pizza, breakfast recognizes the pure awesomeness of a few strips of bacon and sausage links lying there side by side on the plate, doing their own thing.  That’s just how breakfast rolls.  Unfortunately, as with many cherished American institutions, we as a nation have largely forgotten the true meaning of breakfast. 

A really good breakfast used to be special.  It was something to be cherished, like sleeping late or an open bar.  You would enjoy a good breakfast as a means of 1) awkwardly bonding with your blended family, 2) impressing a date that spent the night, 3) bribing your kids to sit quietly for the entire duration of church, 4) soaking up the booze in your stomach after a night of clubbing, or 5) as a thank you to mom on Mother’s Day for giving up all of her hopes and dreams to raise a family.  Everyone looked forward to breakfast, because if your first meal of the day involves shoving a plethora of greasy, sugar-soaked carbohydrates down your gullet, nothing short of a nuclear war can ruin it.

It was the International House of Pancakes that started us down this slippery slope.  Suddenly breakfast was available 24/7, and people ate it up like locusts in a cornfield, if a cornfield had free refills.  Other restaurants soon jumped on the bandwagon, and suddenly breakfast was being pimped out anytime, anywhere to anyone.  Having breakfast available at all hours has robbed it of the very elements that made it special.  It’s gone from being the Prom Queen to being the Prom Queen 20 years, 65 lbs. and one nasty coke habit later.    

All lunch and dinner foods are interchangeable; you can have sandwiches, pasta, or salad pretty much anytime after 12pm.  However, you would never have a turkey club or cheese ravioli for breakfast.  It simply isn’t done, because people understand (or used to understand) that only breakfast foods are to be consumed at breakfast.  Also, breakfast foods are a bit trickier to prepare; just ask anyone who’s ever burned toast, or ended up throwing away the first pancake of the batch because it’s nearly impossible to get it right on the first try, or attempted to make an omelet with just the right egg-to-filling ratio.  You have to put a little extra effort into making breakfast, and that alone is enough to make it special. 

But now that breakfast can be shoved into a bun and eaten on the bus at 3pm, what’s so special about it?  Will your family or friends be impressed by the same food they can get anytime at the deli around the corner?  Will you?  I don’t know, but I do know that if I’m ever in the mood for a good old-fashioned breakfast, I’m going to McDonald’s from now on; their breakfast items may taste like recycled Styrofoam containers, but at least they respect breakfast enough stop serving it at 10:30am.