Breakfast
Breakfast is the first meal of the day, usually eaten in the morning. Its foods and timing vary across cultures, schedules, and individual habits.
Continental breakfast: A light breakfast commonly served in hotels, often including bread, fruit, coffee, or tea. Its hotel format turns a simple morning meal into a recognizable service tradition.
School breakfast: A meal provided to students before or during the school day. School programs address morning hunger and access to food among children.
Industrial Revolution: A period of major economic and technological change beginning in Britain in the late eighteenth century. Industrial work schedules helped standardize meals around fixed morning routines.
Chinese breakfast: A varied morning meal in China that may include congee, soy milk, noodles, or steamed foods. Its savory dishes challenge assumptions that breakfast is mainly sweet or bread-based.
Full English breakfast: A substantial British breakfast often including eggs, bacon, sausage, baked beans, tomatoes, and toast. This regional meal makes abundance and cooked foods central to breakfast.
Breakfast skipping: The practice of not eating a morning meal, whether by choice or circumstance. Skipping breakfast shows how the meal can be omitted within daily routines.
John Harvey Kellogg: An American physician and health reformer associated with the early development of flaked breakfast cereals. His dietary reform program helped establish cereal as a breakfast food.
Japanese breakfast: A Japanese morning meal often centered on rice, soup, fish, and pickled vegetables. Its meal structure differs from many bread-and-cereal-centered breakfast conventions.
Brunch: A meal combining features of breakfast and lunch, usually eaten late in the morning or early afternoon. Its later timing relaxes breakfast's usual boundary with lunch.
Intermittent fasting: An eating pattern that alternates periods of eating with periods of fasting. Some fasting schedules deliberately delay or omit the day's first meal.