Breakfast is said to be the most important meal of the day, but what is breakfast?

Aside from (incidentally) being my least favourite meal, most people would split the word in two and say that breakfast is when you break the fast. It is the first meal of your day. But what if, hypothetically, I were to fast until 5pm: would I call that a late breakfast, or is it a well-deserved dinner? Perhaps it is both, in which case I would wonder whether there is a difference between breakfast and dinner at all. Or, suppose I ate at a quarter past midnight: this is the first meal of my day, yet 15 minutes is hardly fasting. Most people (I imagine) would simply say that this is a midnight snack despite the fact that it might arguably meet the criteria to be considered breakfast. It seems instead that breakfast has little to do with time at all, as is exemplified by those who have “breakfast for dinner” or serve burgers at a breakfast restaurant. (Let’s not even start about what on earth brunch is supposed to mean!)

Maybe breakfast is something completely different, then. Maybe it’s less about the time it takes place and more about the “genre” of food that it typically consists of. However, this, too, is a frustrated understanding. What do we think of when we think of breakfast? Bacon, eggs, toast, cereal, pancakes, waffles, oatmeal, etc. When these foods come to mind as breakfast items, I wonder what common thread there is that ties them altogether—that is, what quality is common among them that makes them a breakfast item? What is it, for example, that makes bacon a breakfast item rather than, say, a pork chop, even though they are literally from the same animal! Waffles, too, while seen as a breakfast food, might also pass as a dessert at lunch or dinner. There is no inherent quality that seems to designate these foods as “breakfast foods”, and so I feel somewhat justified that I could enjoy a burger for breakfast and cereal for dinner as a teenager.

All in all, what is left but to say that breakfast is nothing but a term we arbitrarily assign to certain times of day or certain kinds of food, as a dictated by custom. So, we might know what someone means when they ask us out to breakfast or ask us to prepare breakfast, but can we say what that means on a deeper level at all? I think not. So, we say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but, as per usual, our “solid understanding” of the terms and concepts involved is in fact that of wet concrete. Are we sure that we even understand the claim being made? And, consequently, can we understand people’s reactions to this claim? My opinion that breakfast is my least favourite meal of the day is in fact as meaningless as the term breakfast itself. Instead, to be more precise, I should say that I object to paying $15.00 for toast and bacon. This is, in fact, the reality that my own statement is based upon, and yet it was unexpressed until now. But such is the typical way of conversation: quite often we neither say what we mean, nor do we even know what we that is.