Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, they say, so of course Marc Murphy wanted to know all about it for this episode of Food 360. Breakfast’s increasing popularity has led to trends like more and healthier breakfast options, all-day breakfast, dinner for breakfast, and everyone’s favorite weekly activity, brunch. Marc invites food historian and author Heather Arndt Anderson into the studio to learn about the history of breakfast, brunch, and Bloody Marys, before talking about the business of breakfast with Square Diner owner Teddy Karounos, who’s been cooking and serving morning meals anytime of day for nearly 20 years.
Heather literally wrote the book on breakfast: it’s called Breakfast: A History, and explores how breakfast became an unpopular idea into the “gastronomic spectacle that it is today,” Marc says. Originally, Heather tells us, breakfast was seen as a sin, because people ate it too soon after dinner, making it seem gluttonous. People structured their days differently then, Heather points out, but the real jumping-off point for breakfast was “the introduction of caffeinated beverages to Europe. When coffee, and tea, and chocolate arrived on the scene, they started changing rules really fast, to make allowances for these things,” Heather says. Rules changed around breakfast again when a “plea for brunch” was published around the turn of the century by Guy Beringer, who said breakfast was too early in the day for people with hangovers. “Having brunch gives the opportunity to take the edge off of your hangover with a little hair of the dog...and it’s at a merciful time of day,” Heather says. “This was just a chance for people to get together and...just have a nice, relaxed meal.”
Alcohol’s place at the breakfast table was cemented in the 1920s with the invention of the Bloody Mary. “Adding juice seemed like an acceptable way to get alcohol’s foot in the door at the breakfast table...it was just vodka and tomato juice. But then Pete Petiot...is the one who added all of the horseradish, and celery, salt, and Worcestershire.” Both Heather and Marc agree that the garnishing of Bloody Marys has gone a little off the rails, both of them having experienced the cocktail with “hamburgers, pieces of pizza...a whole lobster.” Still, the beverage isn’t likely to lose its spot on the breakfast table anytime soon.
Hangovers might have birthed the breakfast cocktail, but the need for speed and convenience in the mornings made even more innovations possible, like breakfast cereal. “A lot of interesting breakfast breakthroughs happened...when women started entering the workforce...because it was a meal that children could prepare for themselves. And that was when breakfast cereal, as we know it today, really hit the mainstream.” Bacon got its place on the table thanks to Edward Bernays, often called the father of American PR, who made it an essential part of a healthy breakfast in service to the cured meats company that hired him. Only two years after his re-brand of bacon, the American Heart Association was formed, perhaps not a very surprising development. “It's pretty funny how that panned out,” Heather says.
Join Marc, Heather, and Teddy to learn how Kellogg’s Corn Flakes tore a family apart, what Marc’s daily breakfast order at Square Diner was, how Bernays invented “expert testimony,” and lots of fun diner lingo, in this episode of Food 360.
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