Toward a heremeneutics of breakfast

One of the few advantages of getting old is that you eventually get better at not doing things you don’t want to do, and what I don’t want to do is eat breakfast, as that meal has been traditionally conceptualized in the Anglo-American world. I don’t like traditional breakfast foods, and I have solved the conundrum this creates by adopting a cultural Marxist/Frankfurt School approach to the issue, by eating little or nothing before late morning/actual noon on most days, other than maybe some buttered bread or the like with the life-giving elixir of black coffee.

The purpose of this thread is to discuss breakfast as a personal and cross-cultural phenomenon.

Good questions to address include:

(1) How common is it across the world etc. for breakfast to be a distinct meal, in which foods that are clearly demarcated as breakfast foods are consumed then, and rarely outside the breakfast paradigm (We can call this the French Toast Theorem)?

(2) How common is it for breakfast to be a substantial meal at all, apart from the kinds of foods that are consumed? The so-called “continental breakfast” is an example of trying to more or less skip breakfast in terms of the three square meals a day frame, which is itself a contestable concept in various ways, both in terms of fewer and more formal meals.

(3) Are breakfast cereals in the American style now a worldwide phenomenon? What about the McMuffin and its relatives? These seem like hyper-efficient responses to the problem that lots of people don’t have the time or inclination to prepare an actual mean first thing in the morning, but don’t want to go all the way to the continental philosophy rejection option of just not having a meal until close to the meridian.

Also, pancakes are objectively gross.