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The "endless eggs" are somewhat of an Americanism but you can try that. If you want to be a little more cosmopolitan, most regions have some tradition or other of a morning porridge -- barley porridge in Nepal, rice as congee in China, a millet porridge called hausa koko in Ghana all come to mind. The American version of this is the morning oatmeal. Europeans sometimes have patterns of eating yogurt or quark, typically with fruit slices and muesli. On the other hand I have a bunch of Dutch relatives, they mostly eat untoasted bread spread with butter and topped with either a meat or cheese or sprinkles (fruity sugar sprinkles or chocolate sprinkles or bigger chocolate flakes). The classic American southern farmer's breakfast was biscuits and gravy. The biscuits are fluffy and bready while the gravy is a white sausage gravy, rich, milky, buttery, peppery, with chunks of sausage. Libby's makes a good can of this stuff, but you should add some cayenne or hot pepper flakes or both. "Sticks to your bones" while you go out to the fields, I think there's something to the refined grains of the biscuits giving you short-term energy so that you don't feel bogged down, while the oils and meats set you up to have longer-term energy as the day winds on. You're asking about food but maybe I'd mention something about patterns... Back when I was a Tibetan Buddhist I got to know some monks. Apparently the ancient history of mendicants in India was that they'd go door-to-door begging for whatever food the people in their neighborhood would offer them. Now, in the present day, where conditions are different -- the monks "beg" from the monastery which is staffed by lay practitioners who manage the money and purchase food and so forth. But a lot of the monastic rules simulate that earlier lifestyle. For example, the monks I met were not allowed to sleep on any sort of mattress, because the earlier mendicants slept on the ground outside. And where this gets interesting is that they also have to eat all their food by noon, "otherwise we'd have no time for meditation." (We also speculated that maybe Indian mendicants didn't want to be perceived as greedy, so if they could get a solid meal maybe they didn't push their luck.) I think this only applied to solid foods -- Tibetans traditionally drink a butter tea, which is exactly what it sounds like, tea leaves that we'd regard as way-way-way oversteeped, churned together with yak butter and salt, and I think they were allowed to drink this in the afternoon. Similarly I think a bowl of broth would have been okay for dinner as long as it didn't have solids in it? But yeah, suggests a large population of folks living for a long time without dinner, and I think I even have a vague memory of the Dalai Lama commenting one of his times in the USA about how it's much harder to be obese if you don't have the concept of dinner. (Although I can imagine as he said those words, probably all the fat monks he has ever known flashed before his eyes, haha.) And like I said, I think the usual starting meal is a sort of barley porridge and then for lunch a "dal bhat" - a spiced dish of rice, lentils, and at least one "vegetable" (which is in scare quotes because it could be for example potatoes). But I might just have had weird friends who liked weird things. |