Breakfast, the greatest con ever pulled. For most of history, you got a lump of bread, a wedge of cheese, or yesterday’s stew if you were lucky. Nobody in Tudor England was tumbling out of bed to a bowl of technicolour hoops with a cartoon parrot telling them it was part of a balanced diet. Balanced? Only if you weighed sugar like bullion.
The rot set in when sugar stopped being the preserve of dukes and duchesses and became cheap enough for the rest of us. Colonial plantations flooded the market, Victorians slathered jam on everything, and suddenly “a bit of toast with something sweet” was respectable. From there it was downhill – enter the cereal companies, who realised you could flog boxes of toasted cardboard to families, so long as you added sugar and a jingle.
And that’s how we got here – where croissants (cake in a beret), pain au chocolat (cake with better PR), and jam on toast (cake on a plank) all masquerade as “breakfast.” Even the so-called “breakfast bar” is just confectionery with a briefcase. We’ve been duped into thinking dessert at 7 a.m. is normal, when in fact it’s capitalism laughing in our faces and calling it “the most important meal of the day.”
The English fry-up at least tried to stand firm – bacon, eggs, mushrooms, ballast fit for a ship’s stoker. My father thought nothing of reheating the previous night’s corned beef hash, cracking an egg over it, and calling it breakfast. And you know what? That was fuel. Not glamorous, not “part of a balanced lifestyle,” but honest grub that would see you through until dinner.
Now? We start the day with sugar in a beret, sugar in a box, sugar on toast. We didn’t wake up to sweetness – sweetness woke up to us, and it’s been emptying our wallets ever since.
No comments:
Post a Comment