Historically, breakfast has been marketed at us, sold to us, literally shoved down our throats as the most important meal of the day. We’ve been sold countless lies about it — that it gives us “fuel for the day” and, the most outrageous of all, that we need cow milk. These can be quite easily debunked. Fuel for my day has been coffee since I was 16 years old. I haven’t voluntarily eaten breakfast since middle school, when they prepared the meals for us and dropped them off to our homerooms. Even then, I found it to be a hassle. Why can’t fuel for the day be the sleep I’m forced to participate in every night against my will and better judgment? There are lots of people who simply do not need breakfast, whom breakfast makes nauseous. This includes myself. Eating as soon as you wake up doesn’t make sense. There are more important things to participate in.
As for milk, the “Got Milk?” campaign, launched in 1993, taught us that milk was good for our bones. Although this is kind of true, this does not mean that we need it. Coupling celebrities with milk moustaches helped to mask the simple fact that milk is not better for anyone than regular vegetables. Dairy is not a necessity. We have been lied to. That’s why breakfast is the third best meal (of four).
Lunch is a superior meal based on one staple: the sandwich. At lunch, we find the classic peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the grilled cheese, the ham and cheese and the tuna melt, all before even entering the fancy parts of lunch. The fanciest sandwich I have ever encountered is the Reuben. I am not a fan of the Reuben, but I would go to the bat for it. Whomever decided to put sauerkraut on a sandwich deserved to win a Nobel Prize. The phenomenal thing about the Reuben is that none of the ingredients taste good, but people love it anyway. Sandwiches are the pinnacle of lunch. They are the centerpiece. They draw the meal together. The secondary snacks — the chips, sliced fruits, handfuls of nuts — are just pieces to decorate the sandwiches. Sandwiches elevate lunch above breakfast and dinner, making it the second best meal.
Dinner is by far the least enjoyable meal there is. Dinner is too heavy a meal for people to enjoy it. Dinner is eaten too late in the day. It’s a meat-focused meal that leaves people sluggish and ready for bed, when sleeping after a meal isn’t even good for your body. It hinders chances of doing more activities and makes it difficult to stay awake (and sleeping is simply my personal least favorite activity). It makes no sense to have to unbutton pants after a meal. Dinner catapults you into all the factors necessary to waste your time for the rest of the night. Dinner is precisely what makes Thanksgiving the worst holiday there is. Not only is it an ode to a massacre, but it’s a full weekend of dinner, followed by weeks of people throwing leftovers onto bread and pretending that that’s what making a turkey sandwich should be about. Dinner is one large con.
Brunch, however, is an often forgotten, masterful mixture of breakfast and lunch. It includes the very best breakfast foods and all the important parts of lunch. You get the scrambled eggs of breakfast and the finger foods of lunch. It carries an exclusivity along with it. It ceases to be a meal outside of the weekend. If you eat between the hours of 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.in the middle of the week, you’re choosing between breakfast and lunch. There is no brunch on a Thursday. It is a party meal. On top of it basically being a club, it carries a culture along with it. Women get to gather around eggs Benedict to discuss the events of the week. The one downfall of brunch may very well be that it isn’t marketed as a masculine activity, so men miss out on it a lot, but can you imagine a season of “Sex and the City” without a brunch scene? How would Carrie Bradshaw talk about all the problems she made in her relationships if there were no mimosas to cry around?
There is no debate. The best meal of all is brunch.
