Why Americans Eat Dessert for Breakfast

I f***ing hate American breakfast. Every morning I eat a good breakfast. Right away, a big bite of toast. For kids, we like a square meal for breakfast. A wonderful new fruit-in-the-box cereal. I mean, how did we get here? How did this become breakfast in my country? And what is breakfast even all about? Some people say it's the most important meal of the day, and others say that it's totally worthless and you don't even need to eat breakfast if you don't want to. Two pancakes with hot syrup and butter. I bet a lot of you watching don't eat breakfast in the morning. And you know who else doesn't eat breakfast in the morning? This guy. What do you eat for breakfast? Nothing. I grew up thinking that breakfast had to be a certain way. But then, in my 20s, I started traveling. And I learned that, in fact, this version of breakfast is a very narrow, very American version of breakfast. Once I discovered non-American breakfast, I feel like my eyes were opened to a completely different approach to the first meal of the day. I want to show you some of those breakfasts. But first, let's talk about breakfast, and how American breakfast got this way. For about 22 cents, you get as much nutrition as this bacon and egg breakfast, when there's no time for your regular breakfast. Okay, before I jump into all of my opinions about breakfast, let's talk about science for a minute. Does breakfast matter? Is it actually the most important meal of the day, like I was told my whole life? You can't be your best if you don't eat a good breakfast. Turns out there's data on this, lots of studies. But you don't need to read them all. In fact, don't read them all. Let me give you the 22nd version. Turns out, the methods in a lot of these studies are really crummy. They weren't randomized, controlled trials, like, you know, the gold standard for good science. And in a lot of cases, they didn't really study anything useful. They kind of hyper-focus on breakfast as it pertains to weight. And in most of these studies, they don't even focus on what the person is eating for breakfast. They only focus on whether they do or do not eat breakfast, regardless of what they're actually eating. And to add to all of this, a lot of these studies are funded by corporations who have a vested interest in making breakfast seem necessary and healthy. So yeah, there's a lot of science on this, but the science does not come to any useful conclusions, and is oftentimes just poorly conducted. What this means is that there's no real evidence that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and there's nothing special or magic about breakfast. That's more of a marketing myth than anything else. Had any really good days lately? Like when the sun shines brighter, and people seem friendlier, and work goes faster? Days like that? Well, the really good days start out good with new Carnation Instant Breakfast. Okay, wait. But there is a little caveat in this. If you're like an eight-year-old kid, or like a teenager, and you're like in school, there actually is some useful evidence that says that eating breakfast in the morning is good for your learning and brain development. So, that's the caveat. There actually is evidence there. For the rest of us, though, if you like breakfast in the morning, eat breakfast in the morning. If you're not into that, don't do it. Okay? That's it. But, unless you're a kid. But, I don't know how many kids are watching. Okay, so that's the science on this. Turns out that I was a person, for many years, who thought that I didn't like breakfast. That I didn't need to eat breakfast. Growing up in a small town in Oregon, I didn't have a ton of exposure to other cultures and other things. And so, my version of breakfast was this. This is all I knew as breakfast food. When we would eat, like, eggs and bacon for dinner, we were having breakfast for dinner. This food was inseparable from the institution of breakfast. If you're not from the United States, let me just break down what American breakfast is and its story, where it came from. I'll split it out into two main categories of breakfast in the United States. One, I call diner breakfast. It kind of looks like this. And the other, I will call cereal. Which is everything from Pop-Tarts to Fruit Loops. Where are the Fruit Loops? I didn't bring any! To granola bars, to carnation instant breakfast. It's like the quick stuff that's in our pantries that we can just consume before work. First, let's talk about diner breakfast. There's no better reference for what diner breakfast is in the United States than the official menu of IHOP. Which is so inappropriately named as the International House of Pancakes. Welcome to the International House of Pancakes! Hi! At IHOP, this American institution, you can start your day with this. The stuffed French toast. Which effectively looks like my birthday cake. Or, you can get really cultured and hop over to Italy for some Nutella crepes. Or how about the Belgian waffle combo? Which isn't just a waffle, but also comes with bacon and eggs. Perhaps you're feeling savory. So how about this breakfast sampler where you can eat a pig in three different ways? Because who just wants to eat bacon when you can have all three? All of this accompanied by French fries. I mean, sorry, hash browns. But why settle for these meager options when you could go with the Sinistack pancakes? Which come layered with a luscious cinnamon roll filling and drizzled with rich cream cheese icing and topped with, you guessed it, whipped cream. Icing. For breakfast. Now here's the thing. This diner-style American breakfast is inspired by Europe. American pancakes look a lot like other sweet, flat, unleavened breads that are eaten all over the world and especially in Europe. We just deemed it necessary to fry it in butter and then put more butter on top and then drizzle literal liquid sugar over top and eat it for breakfast. That was the only modification we made to this wonderful tradition of European pancakes. The idea of eating pork-based, cured meats in the morning is also a European tradition. It comes from the traditional English breakfast, which is delicious. We just decided to get rid of some elements from that, like the beans and the tomatoes and the mushrooms. Who needs those anyway? The American waffle comes from the beautiful, delicious tradition of the Belgian or Liège waffles, which are served in dessert stores as desserts in Belgium. They're delicious. The modification we made was to eat them for breakfast and then decide to take out the best part, which is the pearl sugar, the crystallized sugar that makes a Belgian waffle or a Liège waffle delicious. To summarize, this diner-style took European traditions, turned them into breakfast, and modified them by making them lower quality, bigger portions, and usually slathering them with cream and maple syrup. All-you-can-eat pancakes. This calls for all-you-can-eat silverware. Get IHOP's all-you-can-eat pancakes free when you buy any breakfast combo. I mean, icing for breakfast? It just doesn't sound good. Okay, so that's the diner version of American breakfast. A big, important category of what Americans like to eat for breakfast. The other category looks like this. This is the stuff that's in our pantries. This is the stuff we eat before we go to work. It's quick. It's what I grew up eating as a child. Let's call this the cereal category. This food came into our lives and became widespread because of one main force. Industrialization. With the birth of factories and the standardized workday, suddenly you had demand for a consistent, quick, convenient food in the morning to fuel you for the day. Paired with that, you also now had technology to mass-produce products that would fit this demand. Perhaps the best symbol of this shift towards mass-produced, easy, convenient breakfast food is Corn Flakes. The Kellogg's Corporation, which made Corn Flakes, was a pioneer in making this breakfast food popular. Not only because they were able to mass-produce it and cheaply sell it, but also because they marketed it in this way that made it feel like the most important thing in the world. But there was a problem. Over time, people would look at this lousy bowl of Corn Flakes and be like, who wants to eat this? This is boring. But America had a solution. All we needed to do was pump it full of sugar. One big gulp of it. Gives me lots of energy for this nutritious breakfast. Without Pop-Tart, I'd be... Geez. I mean, that's pretty aggressive right there. Wow. That's how I feel after I eat a Pop-Tart as well. Anyway, people started to believe that breakfast, and especially these commodities, which were quickly becoming dessert disguised as breakfast, were the key to a healthy morning and a good start to the day. And soon, I was born into a world. A world where breakfast products and norms were cemented before me. A world where millions of Americans would wake up in the morning and consume dessert disguised as breakfast. Your muffin is just a cupcake in disguise. That cup of yogurt might as well be a scoop of ice cream. And then, there's the mighty donut. The food that doesn't even pretend to be breakfast. It's just literal dessert and it's like shamelessly just like, Hey, I'm dessert. Do you want to eat me for breakfast? And a lot of people are like, yeah. I mean, I kind of respect that. I'm kind of like, if you're going to be dessert, just like, represent yourself. I respect the donut. But wait, let me make one thing clear. My issues with this have nothing to do with nutrition, even sugar or calories or any of that. I actually have a big issue with our obsession with categorizing food by its numbers and its constituent parts. Not into that. I don't really care. My problem here is that I don't like this food. I just genuinely do not want to wake up and consume dessert for breakfast. If you do like this stuff for breakfast, that's awesome. I have no issues with you and I'm not going to try to convince you to change that. Cereal Pinkies. Yum. With Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Lucky Charms and Cap'n Crunch. Okay, so a little bit of time has passed and a few things have changed. Number one, I got a haircut. But number two, I think I'm cracking the code on how to change my breakfast experience. I've spent the past few months thinking a lot about breakfast and I've started to introduce different breakfast cultures into my morning routine that have really changed my world. I'm not going to share all this with you now because this video would be like 30 minutes long but I have been filming all of this and it has been a really interesting journey to invite different breakfast cultures into my world. If enough people are interested and you leave comments somewhere I will share it and make a video about what breakfast looks like for me these days. Spoiler alert, there's no icing. I still have my occasional bowl of Lucky Charms which is a delicious cereal and the occasional pancake with my kids. It's great stuff. I mean, I'm not above that food. It's just not what I want to eat every morning. So, anyway, I'll share that if you're interested. Lastly, I want to tell you about today's sponsor which is Skillshare which is a place where I have learned a lot of my video skills but they also have cooking tutorials I discovered. They have a course on there about how to make the perfect grilled cheese sandwich which, by the way, is an amazing breakfast and it's one of thousands that Skillshare has of all different types of topics whether it is animation and video which are the courses I've taken or entrepreneurship, business, photography, design, like basically everything. Skillshare is incredibly cheap and for you it could be completely free for two months. You could have access to all of these tutorials for free if you go to the link in my description. Click that link. It helps support this channel but more importantly it kicks off your journey of learning something new for free for two months. That's like two months. That's like 60 days of zero money playing around with this really awesome resource on the internet. And then after that it's like less than $10 a month if you do the annual subscription which is just ridiculously cheap for what you're getting. Thank you Skillshare for supporting this channel and letting me make these videos and thank you all for watching. I will see you in the next one. Slices of bacon or sausage links hash browns toast, juice too, pan juice just $1.99 served any time of day.