Breakfast in England: Margaret Lane, the author of Jane Austen and Food, has chronicled how, for the rich, breakfast then evolved: ‘Breakfast in Jane Austen’s era [she lived between 1775 and 1817] was very different from the cold meat, coarse bread and ale of earlier ages, or the abundance of eggs, kidneys, bacon and so forth under which Victorian sideboards groaned. Rather it was an elegant light meal of toast and rolls, with tea, coffee or chocolate to drink.’11
But Austen’s era was still socially divided, and to reinforce their superiority the grander classes ate their breakfasts late: ‘The planned excursion from Barton Park to Whitwell in Sense and Sensibility begins with the whole party assembling at Barton Park for breakfast at ten … Jane frequently wrote letters before breakfast. In London she even went shopping.’12 Dissolute members of the aristocracy might breakfast even later. Roger Carbury in Anthony Trollope’s 1875 novel The Way We Live Now, ‘would come at twelve as Felix generally breakfasted at that hour’.13
The late breakfasts, though, pressed up against dinner, which was then eaten in the middle of the day and which was then – as it had been for a thousand years – the biggest meal of the day, so that meal gradually got pushed back. Eventually, as the prosperous classes increasingly enjoyed an evening social life facilitated by candle and other artificial lights, their dinner moved so late as to become an evening meal, largely displacing supper, which was reduced to a bedtime snack. But the lateness of dinner then created a midday gap, which had to be filled by a new meal, which was sometimes called ‘nuncheon’ after ‘noonshine’ (in Sense and Sensibility Willoughby takes nuncheon in an inn) but which became corrupted to ‘luncheon’ (in Pride and Prejudice Lydia and Kitty order luncheon in an inn).
Recapitulating its origins in a snack, this new meal was initially only a cold spread, but as Anthony Trollope captured in The Way We Live Now, it grew: ‘There were two dinner parties every day, one at two o’clock called lunch, and the other at eight.’14 The confusions around the new meal were reflected in 1847 by a fashionable physician, Dr William Robertson, in his Treatise on Diet and Regimen: ‘that anomalous meal, luncheon, becomes necessary or desirable if the dinner cannot be taken about five hours after the breakfast. If a man … cannot dine before five in the evening, he should eat luncheon.’15
The working classes, though, continued to eat their dinner in the middle of the day, and some parts of the north of England and Scotland still describe the midday meal as dinner and the evening meal as tea or high tea. To this day many schools describe the ladies who serve lunch as ‘dinner ladies’.
Breakfast in America: Heather Anderson reports that, initially, the Americans and Britons shared a common breakfast culture:
By the middle of the 18th century, England and America alike were basking in the glow of breakfast’s budding golden age; matitudinal feasts of mutton chops, bacon, eggs, corn cakes, and muffins – even pies – were favourites of American Founding fathers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson … Franklin’s only complaint was that his co-workers drank too much beer in the morning … In well-to-do English households, most days began with porridge, followed by bacon and eggs … Soon the Victorian era witnessed the birth of Britain’s greatest (perhaps only) culinary achievement: the Full Breakfast.fn1
But as American meals and waistlines expanded, so a reaction developed, and during the 1830s the Popular Health Movement arose to advocate a frugal, near-vegetarian diet. In 1863, to help meet the demand for a more modest lifestyle, Dr James Caleb Jackson (1811–95), a New York physician, invented Granula, which consisted of nuggets of bran-rich Graham flour (a type of wholemeal flour). The first wholegrain breakfast cereal had arrived.
In the same year, 1863, and emerging in part from the same Popular Health Movement, the Seventh-day Adventist Church was established at Battle Creek, Michigan. The Adventists’ theology lies outside the purlieus of this book but its health message is relevant because it promotes a vegetarian, alcohol- and caffeine-free lifestyle. In 1866 the Church opened a sanatorium, also at Battle Creek, where its vegetarian teachings were harnessed to cure as well as to prevent disease. Its therapies were holistic, employing nutrition, enemas and exercise; and it was at the sanatorium, in 1894, that its most famous superintendent, Dr John Kellogg (1854–1943), invented cornflakes. Dr Jackson’s Granula had not been very convenient (it needed to be soaked overnight) but cornflakes were very convenient indeed, and with his brother, Will, John Kellogg created the cereal company we know today.
Some of the beliefs of those Popular Health Movement pioneers are now easy to mock. In his 1877 Plain Facts for Old and Young John Kellogg advocated some robust measures against masturbation:
To prevent erection the prepuce or foreskin is drawn forward over the glans, and the needle to which the wire is attached is passed through from one side to another. After drawing the wire through, the ends are twisted together and cut off close. It is now impossible for an erection to occur … In females the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid [phenol] to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.16
And in his 1893 Ladies’ Guide in Health and Disease John Kellogg indeed recommended clitorectomy for nymphomania. An early example of FGM in the western world. Yet John’s views on masturbation were not an isolated idiosyncrasy, because they seemingly linked to his views on breakfast: he apparently trusted that the low levels of cornflake nutrition would inhibit early morning masturbation. Meat, he believed, fuelled lust: ‘Flesh, condiments, eggs, tea, chocolate and all stimulants have a powerful influence directly on the reproductive organs. They increase the local supply of blood; and through nervous sympathy with the brain, the passions are aroused.’17 But cornflakes would leave a person energetically deprived.18
Although he never explicitly marketed cornflakes as an energy-depleting anti-masturbatory tool, John Kellogg nonetheless conceived breakfast cereals – which are now sold as nutritionally valuable – to be nutritionally poor. The history of breakfast is littered with these ironies because, until recently, opinions emerged out of beliefs, not out of empirical evidence.
John was an intellectual who took ideas seriously. His views on masturbation were then orthodox, as were his views on eugenics (he was in favour) and constipation (he was against), but his brother, Will, was not an intellectual and – to promote their palatability – he put sugar into cornflakes, which John opposed. John lost that fight but it was sincerely fought.
One of their contemporaries, Dr Dewey of Meadville, Pennsylvania, went even further, and in his 1900 book The No-Breakfast Plan and the Fasting Cure he advocated skipping breakfast altogether: Dewey wrote that patients who skipped breakfast seemed to make better and faster cures from illnesses than did breakfast eaters.
The revival of breakfast: By the 1920s Dr Dewey seemed to be winning the argument: breakfast in America was apparently declining into little more than a snack. This was a concern to the Beech-Nut Packing Company, which was raising lots of pigs but which was finding too few buyers for its bacon, and it therefore commissioned Edward Bernays to rescue its market.
Bernays, one of the fathers of PR, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, whose techniques he exploited on behalf of powerful clients, which included American Tobacco (for whom he helped break the taboo against women smoking in public) and the United Fruit Company (for whom he helped engineer the coup that removed the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman). Bernays, famously, influenced Goebbels, which is no surprise since in his 1928 book Propaganda he’d written:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country … We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.19
One opinion of the masses that Bernays resolved to manipulate