Three Meals A Day?

Food has always been central to human life, but our eating habits have evolved considerably over time.

The idea of eating three meals a day, for instance, is now an intrinsic practice for many people, yet it’s a relatively recent development in human history.

For centuries, meal habits were sporadic and dictated by various factors: success in hunting or agriculture, religious practices, work schedules, and even the availability of lighting among them.

So how did we arrive at this trio of meals?

Dinner’s Daily Dominance

Of our three routine meals, “dinner” has the deepest etymological roots, though the meaning of the word has shifted over time.

In ancient Roman times, it was the one large meal everyone ate, although it was consumed earlier in the day than it is today — sometime around noon. This extended into the Middle Ages in Europe. Laborers often ate a small meal of bread and ale early in the morning before starting a day’s work on the farm. Their main meal of the day, called dinner, was served around noon, and a light snack, known as supper, was sometimes eaten in the evening. 

By the late 1700s, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing in Britain; workdays became longer, people could no longer come home to eat their main meal of the day, and artificial lighting — primarily candles — became more accessible and reliable, enabling household activities to go later into the evening.

The timing of dinner began to shift, and by the end of the 18th century, many people were eating dinner in the evening after returning home from work. For most people in Europe and the United States, this evening meal became the largest and anchor meal of the day by the mid-1800s, informing the traditional family dinner as we still know it.

Breakfast’s Beginnings

In the Middle Ages, Christian religious routines dictated that nothing could be eaten before morning Mass. The word “breakfast,” literally meaning to “break the fast” from the night before, is believed to have originated in this period. Despite the term’s origins, however, breakfast as a regular meal wasn’t widely adopted until Britain slowly began industrializing and its population started moving from farms to cities throughout the 1600s.

As the Industrial Revolution progressed through the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and the United States, so did the need for a regular morning meal to sustain workers through labor-intensive mornings. By the early 20th century, breakfast culture took off even further thanks to figures such as John Harvey Kellogg, who invented Corn Flakes cereal, as well as marketing campaigns in the 1920s and ’30s promoting breakfast as the most important meal of the day. 

Lunch Arrives Late

As industrialization reshaped daily routines and more people moved from farms to factories and offices, workers needed something to sustain them during the long hours between their morning and evening meals at home.

Enter lunch, the last of the three modern meals to cement its place in our daily eating habits. As late as 1755, lunch was simply understood as a small amount of food, more of a snack than a formal meal. Though the origins of the word are murky, it’s likely a short form of “luncheon,” itself possibly from the English words “lump” (a small mass) and “nuncheon” (a slight midday refreshment).

It wasn’t until around 1850 that lunch officially began filling the gap between breakfast and dinner.

By the turn of the 20th century, it had become a defined meal, typically eaten between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m., and consisting of standard lunch fare even by today’s standards: sandwiches, soups, and salads.

Bon appetit!