Five Dollar Post – Why the Fascination with Brinner?
Friday, July 29th, 2011At lunch yesterday I sat in my company’s cafeteria with my normal dining companions and we got onto the topic of what to have for supper. (There’s nothing like planning the next meal before you’ve finished the current one…) One coworker mentioned “brinner” (breakfast for dinner) with the same enthusiasm I’ve heard from lots of other people in the past couple of years.
I piped up and said, “I just don’t get what all the fuss is about brinner.” My colleague responded, “But, it’s breakfast for dinner!!” as though that explained everything. I told her that I understood that she was current with some sort of cultural heatwave around eating breakfast for dinner (after all, there was an entire episode of Scrubs dedicated to the fascination with brinner), but that I still didn’t understand why breakfast served in the evening was any more exciting than breakfast served in the morning.
Then it hit me. I came up with my very own (probably genius!) theory regarding this otherwise inexplicable excitement over an egg served after 10:00am. I posited that the excitement stems not from breakfast at supper time, but breakfast at all. No matter how many nutritionists preach the value of starting the day off right – with a full breakfast – far too many people blow it off. We stir protein powder into a glass of milk and call it a meal. We eat a Nutrigrain bar in the car on the way to work and think it counts as breakfast. Or we skip it altogether. But very few people – or perhaps more accurately stated, very few young working people – eat an actual breakfast every day.
And that is why so many of my contemporaries are drooling over brinner. If they don’t eat breakfast for dinner, they don’t eat it at all. Breakfast foods are wonderful. Eggs, biscuits, smoothies, pancakes, waffles, bacon, and so on are terrific foods. Forsaking them all for the convenience of a granola bar is a shame. But I think that may be what has happened here.
I may not eat bacon and eggs every morning, but I do eat a real breakfast every single day. And if I ever stopped, well, I’d be very cranky for starters, but more importantly, I’d really miss eating breakfast. Perhaps then the fascination with brinner would resonate with me too.
Because it’s Friday and I’m feeling lighthearted, let’s take a little poll. Do you eat breakfast every day? What is your most common breakfast? I’ll go first. As I mentioned before, I’m a crank if I don’t eat breakfast, so I take it seriously. Most days I make a strawberry-banana smoothie and a piece of whole wheat toast with peanut butter. This week it’s been toasted banana nut bread, an egg over easy, and a small bowl of strawberries. In the winter I switch to oatmeal and hot chocolate. Okay, your turn!