Bacon and eggs with a side of mythmaking

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In my old job, whenever a new member or intern joined the department, we’d have a big team lunch to welcome them and introduce ourselves. We’d go ‘round the table, offering get-to-know-you info, as one does, before throwing in an offbeat, screwball question to shake things up with some levity. Among our favorites was to have each person reveal their favorite conspiracy theory, and/or the conspiracy theory they most believed in.

My response to this ritual was always the same: Breakfast is not, in fact, the most important meal of the day, but instead a lie marketed and sold to the masses by “Big Breakfast.” Set aside your personal feelings, I’d urge — breakfast foods are my favorite cuisine type, for the record — and consider that nearly everyone first heard this trope from commercials peddling breakfast foods; from some pantsless, anthropomorphic animal peddling breakfast foods; or from parents, teachers, or other susceptible consumers who’d heard it from one of those and then passed it along as fact.

Somehow, this unassailable logic was routinely met with derision.

I was reminded again just how right I was by an enjoyable write-up of the essential-breakfast myth by Vox health correspondent Julia Belluz.

For one thing, many of the studies purporting that skipping breakfast is bad for health and weight management were funded by breakfast companies. Belluz points to some of these, including one from 2014, which not only was funded by Quaker Oats but also allowed Quaker to contribute to study design and edit the manuscript. More recently, independent, randomized control trial studies have found “no evidence to support the notion” that eating breakfast helps with weight loss. It may even promote weight gain.

For another, the very notion of breakfast as the most important meal was first popularized by cereal inventors in the late 19th century, notably John Harvey Kellogg. As Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal author Abigail Carroll recounted to the Guardian back in 2016, this idea was truly cemented in public consciousness in the second half of the 20th century when one of America’s greatest ad men concocted a campaign to sell more bacon.

Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and often called the “father of public relations,” got a doctor to agree that, in principle, a protein-heavy breakfast was better for a person than a light breakfast, and then sent that statement to 5,000 doctors asking if they agreed. They did, and newspapers throughout the country ran headlines proclaiming that doctors urged a heavy breakfast of bacon and eggs for the American people. Voila.

My point, dear reader, beyond taking a victory lap, is that not all aphorisms are as they seem. In our unserious political moment, when not just campaigns but policymaking itself has become a form of sloganeering, where effete Brooklynites push “Modern Monetary Theory” and “democratic socialism” as if they had meanings based in reality, and red-capped student activists volley back with “socialism sucks” as if that were an adequate response, we all should be increasingly wary of the tropes we buy and sell.

—By J. Grant Addison

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