To examine mealtimes is to raise the question of what constitutes a meal, and to note that they obey cultural and social as well as biological rules.
To most people in the western world, the rhythm of the day punctuated by three meals seems so natural that it must always have existed. This daily rhythm is only one embedded in others: Meals are also patterned by the week, with its weekdays and weekend, and by the year, with its seasonal and ritual variations. The insertion of the daily rhythm into the larger patterns imposes variations on any ‘standard’ model. Meals themselves are patterned too, each meal having its foods which are seen as appropriate, and which are consumed in an ‘appropriate’ order. Other societies, whether distant in time or in space, do not necessarily have the same patterns.
The names of meals in English have been extraordinarily varied and mobile. ‘dinner’, usually defined as the main meal of the day, is still a midday meal for some, and an evening meal for others; ‘lunch’ finally ousted the earlier terms, but retained enough of its snack connotations to be used to designate a mid-morning snack as well as a midday meal until well after the Second World War; ‘tea’ can be afternoon tea, or hight tea, a replacement for another variable meal, supper. Breakfast is becoming another rarity in many households, squeezed out by the pressures of rushed lives, and it was not always a fixture in the past. Which of these meals are deemed ‘real’ meals depends on the patterns mentioned above. A ‘real’ meal is part of a structured day, and is itself structured; a snack is to be consumed casually as the need arises.
Mealtimes are partly conditioned by physiological constraints. The body’s requirements for fuel are twofold: the brain’s need for glucose, and other tissues’ need for fatty acids. While reserves of the latter are stored in adipose layers and can last for days or even weeks, glucose requirements have a shorter cycle. The basic imperative is at least one meal every 24 hours: below this, the body starts cannibalizing its own tissues to supply the brain with glucose. But a shorter rhythm is more common. About four hours after eating, as direct glucose supplies to the brain dwindle and are replaced by glycogen (polymerized glucose) stored in body tissues and reprocessed by the liver, appetite signals the need to renew the glucose supply by eating again.
Where food supplies are uncertain, it is better to eat all the food in one or two big meals (this increases fatty deposits and thus chances of survival); where food supply is not a problem, a rhythm of fewer, smaller meals is more appropriate. The modern trend to frequent snacking is thus nutritionally rational. One would expect to find that in earlier times, when famine was still a risk, food ingestion was grouped into one or two main meals, later giving way to a pattern of more numerous, smaller meals. But although some developments in mealtimes can be ascribed to physiological needs, cultural and social norms play the deciding role.
Medieval and Renaissance writers on diet and health emphasized that two meals a day should be sufficient, and that eating more often was the sign of a ‘beastly’ life (Boorde,1542). Control of appetite distinguished man from animals, and such recommendations implied that labourers, who took up to five meals a day, were less human than the upper classes and the religious, who took only two. While for workers the distribution of meals was decided by the needs of the working day, the upper classes could adopt different rhythms which acted as signs of status. In 15th-century Italy, only peasants took the midmorning and afternoon collations in the fields, and to eat these meals betrayed one’s inferior social origin. Throughout medieval and early modern Europe, the upper classes took two principal meals, dinner and supper, whereas workers took more. More meals for the lower classes remained the rule well into the 19th century.
In Europe, two cycles of movement in mealtimes can be observed, both involving societies developing from a simple rural model to a sophisticated urban one. In its early days, Rome had its main meal, cena, in the middle of the day, but as the Empire developed, mealtimes shifted, and cena became an evening meal, with prandium at midday.
What happened in Rome was repeated in the rest of Europe, at differing rates. The one constant was that dinner was the main meal of the day, followed by supper about six hours later. Dinner in the medieval castle was at around 10 a.m. Supper was the only other meal, with snacks for breakfast, which is mentioned only infrequently in household ordinances, between dinner and supper, and on retiring.
In England by the 16th century, aristocratic mealtimes had hardly moved. William Harrison, in his Description of England (1587), gives the times for dinner and supper as 11 and 5 for the gentry, 12 and 6 for merchants, and 12 and 7 or 8 for farmers. The mealtimes of the poor are dismissed as an irrelevance: they ‘dine and sup when they may’—a clear sign of the gulf between culturally conditioned mealtimes and those imposed by necessity.
But at some point in the 17th century, for reasons that are still not clear, late dining became a sign of social distinction. The upper-class dinner moved from midday or 1 o’clock in the middle of the 17th century to 5 or 6 p.m. by the end of the 18th, pushed on by relentless pressure from below, as the middling sort imitated the élite and the élite dined ever later to maintain its social distance. There was also a difference between London hours and the provincial timetable, so the variables were both social and geographic.
Since the standard hour for breakfast was 9 or 10 in the morning, the long interval between breakfast and dinner led to the ‘invention’ of lunch to fill the gap. Breakfast became earlier and more substantial, marking the final phase of the development of the modern day, with the earlier breakfast followed by lunch at about 1 p.m., and an evening meal, usually called ‘dinner’, supper becoming a late-night snack. In the 1850s the dinner hour was 7 or 7.30 p.m. in fashionable circles, and 6 o’clock for the middle class. For most of the 20th century, the mid-19th-century pattern prevailed.
In other European countries, one can observe a gradual shift, with similar differences between social classes and between the capital and the provinces. The trend to late dining seems to have arrived earlier in Italy and Spain, later in more northerly countries. It was the industrialization of early 19th-century Europe that finally imposed the three-meal pattern and its limited midday eating time, which in turn made the evening meal more important. Rushed meals are nothing new.
Outside Europe and North America, there are many variations on the western timetable. What can be seen is a tendency for older two-meal patterns to give way to three meals. In Japan, two meals, at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., were the norm from the 8th to the 12th centuries, but today the three-meal pattern prevails. These meals are taken at 7 or 8 o’clock in the morning, at midday, and at 6 p.m., with tea (o-cha) in between. What distinguishes the Japanese pattern is the nature of the meals: they all offer the same foods (rice, vegetables, soup, etc.), but the midday meal is simpler, eaten faster, and is the only one which can be taken standing up. China follows a similar pattern, but with meals taken rather earlier. In India, two meals are the norm. The timetable is less rigid, and the rhythm of meals is marked by their composition, which is determined by the time of day (morning or afternoon) rather than by precise hours.
The clash between the western pattern and a traditional one can be observed among the Quecha Indians in Ecuador. Pressure to adopt white lifestyles, with fixed hours, is displacing the more flexible day which began and ended with two light, sweet snacks, with two savoury meals taken in mid-morning and late afternoon, thus freeing the hours in the middle of the day for agricultural work. Pressure for change to more western habits is weakening other cultures’ traditional patterns, just as these habits seem to be declining in the West.
By Alan Davidson in "The Oxford Companion to Food". edited by Tom Janie, Oxford University Press, 1999, excerpts pp. 1471-1473. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.