Writing

For much of history, breakfast existed in the shadows. While beautifully preserved cookbooks and food histories tell us about lavish meal productions in ancient times, this simple morning meal has often been overlooked in the annals of history. But we’ve clearly been eating something for a morning meal. From an etymological perspective, the English word “breakfast” is derived from the French disd?jeuner, which in turn comes from the Latin disieiunare meaning “un-fast.” Disd?jeuner was contracted in the 11th-century to disner and became the English “dinner.” The usage of “dinner” coincided with a shift of the main meal of the day from midday to evening. The French d?jeuner became the midday meal (lunch), and other languages followed suit, relegating the early morning meal to a petit d?jeuner--literally a small lunch. It is almost as if from a linguistic perspective we were looking to intentionally de-emphasize the significance of a morning meal by making it a variation of an existing one.