Who decided this was a breakfast food?

I remember one time I found myself standing in front of a hotel breakfast buffet in a hotel (not know for the quality of its breakfast buffet) staring at a tray of rubbery scrambled eggs with the sort of existential dread usually reserved for tax audits or dental surgery.

To my left was a vat of gray gravy. To my right, a tower of sugary cereals so brightly colored they could probably guide planes in for a landing during heavy fog. And somewhere in the middle, a respectable-looking woman was using a pair of tongs to stack bacon onto a plate like she was building a pork-based retaining wall.

It occurred to me, in that fluorescent-lit haze of 7:00 a.m., that breakfast is a deeply weird meal.

Think about it. At dinner, we have rules. You wouldn’t serve a bowl of marshmallows and milk for dinner (unless you are a student or recently divorced). But at breakfast? Anything goes. We eat dessert disguised as "pancakes." We drink bean juice that makes our hearts beat faster. We consume the flesh of a pig that has been cured in salt until it is essentially jerky.

And we do it all with a sense of moral superiority, as if eating a "hearty breakfast" is a civic duty.

But why? Why these specific foods? Why not soup? Why not curry? Why did we collectively decide that the first thing our stomachs deserve after eight hours of rest is a sugar-coated corn flake or a slab of fried meat?

I decided to look into it. And, as is usually the case with human history, the answer is a combination of religious fanaticism, corporate manipulation, and a few goats on a caffeine high.

The war on passion (or, why your cereal is so bland)

If you enjoy a bowl of corn flakes in the morning, you are participating in a century-old medical experiment designed to stop you from sinning.

I wish I were joking.

In the late 19th century, the American diet was a horror show. People started their day with leftovers from the night before—boiled potatoes, cured meats, and heavy pies. Indigestion, or "dyspepsia," was the national ailment. Enter the health reformers.

The cracker clergyman

First, we have Sylvester Graham. You know him from the cracker. In the 1820s, Graham was a Presbyterian minister who became convinced that the American diet was leading to physical and moral ruin. He believed that meat, spices, and alcohol inflamed the "animal passions."

Graham’s logic was simple, if completely insane: tasty food makes you lustful. Bland food makes you holy.

He advocated for a diet of coarsely ground whole wheat (graham flour), hard mattresses, cold showers, and absolute sexual restraint. He was essentially the 19th-century version of that friend who won’t shut up about their juice cleanse, but with more brimstone. He invented the Graham cracker not as a delivery vehicle for marshmallows and chocolate, but as a dense, flavorless brick of fiber designed to curb your libido.

The wizard of Battle Creek

Then came the heavy hitter: Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.

Kellogg ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, which was basically a spa for the wealthy and worried well. It was a Seventh-day Adventist institution, and Kellogg was a true believer. He was obsessed with the bowel. He was obsessed with "biologic living." And, like Graham, he was obsessed with stopping people from having any fun whatsoever.

Kellogg believed that illness began in the gut and was exacerbated by the "solitary vice" (a polite Victorian euphemism for masturbation). To combat this, he prescribed a regime that included:

• Yogurt enemas (don't ask).
• Electric light baths.
• A diet so intentionally bland it would bore your taste buds into submission.

One day, while trying to make digestible wheat for his patients, Kellogg and his brother Will accidentally left some cooked wheat sitting out. It went stale. Rather than throw it away, they rolled it out and baked it. The wheat flaked.

They had invented the flake.

They tried it with corn, and voilà: Corn Flakes were born. They were marketed as a health food, a digestive aid, and a moral corrective. The idea was that if you ate this toasted corn parchment, you would be regular, healthy, and significantly less likely to have impure thoughts.

The irony, of course, is that Will Kellogg—the business-minded brother—eventually realized that people actually liked flavor. He wanted to add sugar. John Harvey was horrified. They fought, Will started his own company, added sugar, and created the empire we know today.

So, the next time you crunch into a bowl of cereal, remember: you aren’t just eating breakfast. You are eating a failed anti-masturbation tool that was saved by capitalism.

The bacon conspiracy

If cereal was born out of religious zealotry, the "classic" American breakfast of bacon and eggs was born out of pure, unadulterated spin.

Before the 1920s, most Americans ate a light breakfast. Maybe a roll, some coffee, perhaps a bit of fruit. It was quick and efficient. This was a problem for the Beech-Nut Packing Company.

Beech-Nut sold bacon. They wanted to sell more bacon. But people weren't buying it. So, they did what any rational corporation would do: they hired Edward Bernays.

The father of spin

Edward Bernays is often called the "father of public relations." He was also, funnily enough, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. While Freud was using psychology to understand the human mind, Bernays was using it to manipulate it.

Bernays didn't run ads saying, "Please buy our bacon, it's tasty." That was too amateur. Instead, he decided to change the very definition of breakfast.

He approached a doctor (a PR agency having a doctor on speed dial feels inherently suspicious, doesn't it?) and asked a leading question: Would a heavy breakfast be better for the American public than a light one? The doctor, thinking about energy and metabolism, said yes. A heavy breakfast replenishes energy lost during the night.

Bernays then asked this doctor to write to 5,000 of his colleagues, asking if they agreed. About 4,500 of them wrote back saying, essentially, "Sure, sounds right."

The headline that changed history

Bernays took this data and went to the newspapers. He didn't say "Beech-Nut wants you to eat bacon." He placed stories with headlines like: "4,500 Physicians Urge Americans to Eat Heavy Breakfasts to Improve Their Health."

The articles helpfully suggested that a perfect example of a heavy, energy-rich breakfast was... bacon and eggs.

It was a masterstroke. It appealed to our deference to authority (doctors say so!) and our health anxiety. Sales of bacon soared. The "All-American Breakfast" was cemented in the cultural consciousness not because of tradition, or nutritional necessity, but because a guy in a suit wanted to move more pork units in the 1920s.

It is a testament to the power of marketing that, a hundred years later, if I tried to serve you a salad for breakfast, you would look at me like I was insane. But if I serve you a plate of cured meat that is 40% fat, you nod approvingly and say, "Good start to the day."

The bean that woke the world

And then, there is the liquid that makes it all possible. The black gold. The jitter juice. Coffee.

Unlike cereal or bacon, coffee wasn’t invented by a prude or a PR man. It was discovered, if legends are to be believed, by goats.

The story goes that a goatherd named Kaldi in 9th-century Ethiopia noticed his goats were dancing around like teenagers at a rave after eating red berries from a certain bush. Kaldi tried the berries, felt the buzz, and brought them to a local monastery. The monks, initially thinking the berries were the devil's work, threw them into the fire.

The roasting beans smelled delicious. The monks raked them out, ground them up, dissolved them in water, and realized that this "devil's drink" allowed them to stay awake for extremely long prayer sessions.

From Sufi mystics to London gossips

Coffee spread from Ethiopia to Yemen, where Sufi mystics used it for religious ceremonies. By the 15th century, it was the fuel of the Islamic world. It was so potent that religious authorities occasionally tried to ban it, but the people liked being awake too much.

When coffee hit Europe in the 17th century, it caused chaos. In England, it replaced weak beer and gin as the morning drink of choice. (Yes, before coffee, people often started the day with alcohol, which explains a lot about European history).

The "coffeehouse" became a phenomenon. In London, for the price of a penny (the cost of a cup), you could sit in a smoke-filled room, listen to the news, debate politics, and wire your brain with caffeine. They were called "Penny Universities."

These places were rowdy, intellectual, and overwhelmingly masculine. They were the internet chat rooms of the 1600s. People would spend hours there, fueled by caffeine, arguing about the king or the price of wool.

It completely changed the rhythm of the day. Alcohol is a depressant; it makes you sluggish. Coffee is a stimulant; it makes you sharp, anxious, and productive. You could argue that the entire Enlightenment—and the subsequent Industrial Revolution—was powered by the switch from morning beer to morning bean.

We don't drink coffee because it tastes good (let's be honest, the first time you tried it, you hated it). We drink it because the modern world requires a level of alertness that the human body cannot naturally sustain. We are all just 17th-century peasants trying to sober up enough to operate heavy machinery.

The industrial clock

This brings us to the final piece of the puzzle: the clock.

For most of human history, you ate when you were hungry, or when the chores allowed. But with the Industrial Revolution, time became money. The factory whistle blew at 8:00 a.m. You couldn't spend two hours preparing a leisurely meal.

Breakfast had to be fast. It had to be convenient.

This is why the "breakfast food" category exists. It’s all about speed.

• Cereal: Pour, eat, go.
• Toast: The pop-up toaster (invented in 1919) meant you didn't have to watch the bread over a fire.
• Instant Coffee: Developed after World War II, so you didn't even have to brew.

We sacrificed flavor and texture for efficiency. We accepted the idea that breakfast is a "fuel stop" rather than a meal. We grab a granola bar (which is just a cookie with better PR) and eat it in the car.

It’s a far cry from the farm breakfasts of old, but it fits our life perfectly. We are busy, we are tired, and we are usually running five minutes late.

The verdict

So, where does this leave us?

We are eating anti-masturbation flakes, marketed pork, and drinking goat-juice, all because we need to get to work on time.

When you look at it that way, breakfast seems ridiculous. But there is also something charming about it. These foods, born of odd histories, have become rituals. There is comfort in the crunch of the cereal. There is nostalgia in the smell of bacon. There is a necessary mercy in the first sip of coffee.

We didn't decide these were breakfast foods. History decided for us. The religious zealots, the marketing geniuses, the goatherds, and the factory owners all conspired to put that plate in front of you.

But you have a choice.

Tomorrow morning, you could have leftover pizza. You could have curry. You could have a salad.

Or, you could do what I did at that hotel buffet in Ohio. You could embrace the absurdity. I took a scoop of the gray gravy, I took a piece of the PR-bacon, and I poured myself a cup of the monk-juice. I sat down, watched the sun come up over the parking lot, and ate my history lesson.

It tasted mostly of salt and sugar. And it was exactly what I needed.