Have you ever thought about why we typically eat three meals per day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Is it something our bodies naturally need or more of a social construct from the past? Paul Freedman, a history professor at Yale University, answered this question in his book Food: The History of Taste.
According to him, there’s no real reason we need to have three meals every single day. It’s simply a pattern we adopted because it’s easy and predictable and because in the past, most families gathered to eat together. More women stayed at home being housewives than today and made sure their families got hearty breakfast, lunch, and dinner day after day.
Today, a majority of people leave work late or don’t have a fixed schedule for coming home, and this is true for all the adults in a household. Therefore, we turn to snacking throughout the day because it’s faster and more convenient. We consider ourselves lucky if we get to have dinner together as a family, and dinner spontaneously became the biggest and most important meal in the day.
