Breakfast Sucks

It's time for our readers to grapple with an uncomfortable truth.

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

One of the great things about having a website is that every day you can make it anew. For instance, today I assigned myself a blog about the Washington Post’s absurd and idiotic new plan to use an AI chatbot as an editor for random contributors who could flood its (web)pages with chum content. I was going to try to take a look at this policy, which you can read about here in the New York Times, and attempt to discern what the Post could actually get out of this, besides a firehose of sub-standard content to blast onto the internet in the hopes of dislodging some new stream of clicks or impressions, a metric which has for almost a decade now provided rapidly diminishing returns to any publishing business that seeks to effectively monetize it. The Post’s new strategy, to me, seems like the publishing equivalent of fracking, in that perhaps it will have short term utility in providing an outdated resource but in doing so will basically fuck up everything around it irrevocably.

However, I’m not going to write that blog today, because in the process of thinking about it I got hungry at the awkward liminal time of 11:15 a.m., which made me think about breakfast, which I dislike. Breakfast sucks.

Take stock of yourself in this moment. What are you feeling? I imagine it is some kind of revulsion, disgust, or anger — from the little Washington Post item but also from my take. You are thinking of eggs, and pancakes, and all of the beloved foods you associate with cozy mornings at home or companionable trips to a diner with friends. You are not wrong to grasp for these memories in a time of crisis, but allow yourself to feel them and move on. We have serious thinking to do and cannot allow ourselves to be swayed by sentimental excess.

Breakfast sucks! It is an ill-timed, inconvenient, and largely superfluous meal. “The most important meal of the day,” — shut up. Here is my beef with breakfast: you could just go straight to lunch. Lunch food is better. It’s not so much that I have a problem with eggs and pancakes and traditional western “breakfast” foods. I like them. They are fine. But to me they represent a fundamental stunting of the human experience, a gravitation toward bland comfort and simplicity that treats the beginning of our days like infancy, as we crawl blearily toward plates and bowls of things like “porridge” or “cereal” or “oatmeal.” You are a larvae, a grub, a tiny mewling whelp that can only consume mush and simple carbohydrates and proteins presented in front of you like slop in a trough, no matter how the “new American” place your friends have been “dying to try” presents them. Grits? Cream of Wheat? Look at yourself! You are taking no risks in life. You are shoveling gruel into your gullet simply by virtue of it being before noon! The advent of hot sauce and cross-cultural delights like “huevos rancheros” has improved the overall experience somewhat, but when it comes down to it, the flavor profile of most traditional breakfast foods is bland, greasy, or sweet. They pair well with Diet Coke, sure, but you know what else does? Almost everything you can get for lunch — a far superior meal.

I became more convinced of this truth this morning, when I skipped the traditional breakfast window and then found myself ravenous before the delivery lunch specials kicked in. I could have gone to the bodega and gotten a breakfast sandwich, but it already seemed too late in the day. I was awake. I was aware. I craved taste and flavor and excitement. Perhaps — a pad thai dish. Perhaps even… pad kee mao? No. Too spicy. Let’s be realistic here: I am still a boring man in his 30s with gastrointestinal problems. I crave the delights of a banh mi or even of “pepperoni pizza” but often times that is my heart writing checks my small intestine cannot cash. And yet — I would rather die by the sword of indigestion than go meekly to my grave with a stomach full of stodgy pancakes.

I am not saying that there is no pleasure to be found in breakfast. Everyone needs to be coddled sometimes — when I am distressed by waking up before 9 a.m. or hungover or otherwise not ready to face the full breadth of experience the world has to offer, I will happily order a bacon egg and cheese. But the delights of dinner, of lunch — they are what life is really about. They are what make our waking hours worthwhile, what has pushed our need to consume past the base instinct of animals and into an art form that is celebrated all over the globe. There is no culinary tradition on earth that I can think of that is celebrated primarily for its breakfasts. And so I think if you want to truly maximize your fleeting time on this beautiful earth, you must come around to my way of thinking: breakfast sucks. Eat lunch or dinner food at any hour. This blog is now over because my pad thai is here.