It ’s a typical Thursday , and although you ’ve just wake up , there ’s a skillful chance you already know when you ’ll run through today : morning , noon and evening . While the cognitive content of your scale may depart from day to day , you rarely diverge from getting three squares . But have you ever stopped to marvel why ? Is there a biologic grounds to eat three meal a Clarence Day , or is it a social construct so ingrained in our culture that you never question it ?
If you consider how difficult it is to go against the grain — glass cream for breakfast or cereal for supper — there may be something to the melodic theme that when we deplete ( not to mention what we run through at specific times of daylight ) is related more to democratic civilisation than to biological needs . Yale University story prof Paul Freedman , editor in chief of " Food : The chronicle of Taste , " could n’t correspond more .
Freedman postulate there is n’t a biologic reason to run through three meal a twenty-four hour period . The number of repast consume every day is a ethnic blueprint citizenry have adopted because there ’s comfort in predictability . And it ’s a concept that ’s worked for decades . Imagine uberhousewife June Cleaver from the idyllic fifties sitcom " Leave it to Beaver " deviate from her day-to-day prep of a hearty breakfast , lunch anddinnerfor her family . Even modern television often shows families sitting down to dinner or breakfast together before head out to schoolhouse or work . The problem , Freedman enjoin , is that this pattern no longer process with the reality of New docket . few hoi polloi leave work every mean solar day at the same clip , and free clock time is filled with sport and screen time — go forth less room for the three - meals - a - day mannequin [ informant : Freedman ] .
This is just one reason the snack industry continues to experience explosive growing . In the United States , sales of box collation foods are expected to reach $ 77 billion in 2015 ; globally , the bite industry could reach $ 330 billion in 2015 [ sources : Packaged Snacks , Global Industry psychoanalyst ] .
So when — and why — did we start eating three repast a day ? In the 1920s and 1930s , the U.S. government began promoting breakfast as the most important repast of the Clarence Day , and many people put to work manual jobs required a hearty noon repast to sustain them . More recently , a sight conduct by the U.S. Department of Agriculture revealed a shift away from breakfast and lunch as the day ’s independent meals . The Brobdingnagian majority of respondents report eating their main meals at noontide and again at 6 p.m. , with fewer taking the fourth dimension to eat breakfast [ reference : USDA ] .
