Three meals a day is a fairly modern habit
In much of medieval northern Europe, people ate two main meals: a midday dinner and an early supper. Breakfast became normal because of towns, work and school.
“Breakfast, lunch and dinner” feels like a law of nature. It isn’t.
The two-meal day
In his book Millennium, the historian Ian Mortimer describes northern Europe around 1500: most people ate dinner, the main meal, at around 11 a.m., and supper at around 5 p.m. Few people ate breakfast. Labourers, children, the sick and travellers sometimes had something early, but it wasn’t a fixed meal for everyone.
What changed
- Town work. As more people worked long hours for employers in towns, they couldn’t stop for supper at five. Supper moved later into the evening.
- Dinner slipped. The main meal moved a couple of hours later and became what we’d call lunch.
- A gap appeared. Getting from waking up to a later lunch required food: breakfast.
- School. More boys went to school, and long lessons required them to eat first.
By 1600, Mortimer argues, breakfast was normal in towns.
The word itself
The word records the change. Breakfast is “breaking the fast” of the night. And the meaning of dinner has slid from midday to evening over the centuries, which is why some English speakers still call their midday meal “dinner” and their evening meal “tea”.
This question has been popular on History Stack Exchange, where people generally agree that meal times followed work much more than any idea about health.
Bring it up
“Breakfast only became normal in Europe around 1600, partly because of school.”
Follow the thread
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