I hate breakfast

I hate breakfast. Everybody’s always like, “Better eat a good breakfast! Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!” Fuck breakfast. There’s no way it’s more important than lunch or dinner. Hell, even a decent midafternoon snack is of more consequence than breakfast. Even if you don’t have anything in the house, just an apple maybe, a glass of juice. I’ll take a half-eaten bag of pretzels over breakfast any day of the week. Because breakfast sucks.

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OK, take a second, close your eyes, imagine all of your favorite foods. Yeah, that’s it, OK, you’ve got them all there, now throw them all away, because we don’t eat any of that stuff for breakfast. Sorry, it’s just eggs and toast, bowls of cereal and yogurt, maybe some pancakes or waffles if your lucky, but even that’s kind of a once-in-a-while treat.

It’s terrible, because I wake up every morning and I’m starving. All I want to do is sit down and eat a full meal. But we don’t do that here. No, you’ve got to eat breakfast, a sorry excuse for what should be one of the three most pleasurable and delightful experiences of every day.

Most people don’t even bother with breakfast, simply because it’s not worth all of the time and trouble for something that’s ultimately not worth it. Better to just slog through the first part of the day on coffee alone and hope that you’re not too famished and pissed off by the time lunch rolls around.

Isn’t it like engrained in our culture? It’s almost perversely celebrated. It’s that scene that you always see in commercials for those Toaster Strudels or Go-Gurts or Eggo Waffles, where a family is running around the house like a bunch of lunatics in the morning, struggling to be wherever it is they’re supposed to get to time. “Don’t forget your breakfast!” the mom calls out to the dad who ran out the door with his tie undone around his neck, the little kids with their backpacks unzipped, homework flying everywhere. And then they stop for all of three seconds to stuff some hyper-processed piece of frozen garbage in their face, “Gee, thanks mom, you’re the best! You and Pop-Tarts!”

What’s there to look forward to? Get up every day, much earlier than you’d ever wake up if you had any real say of how you’d like to live your life, you barely have time to go to the bathroom and brush your teeth, let alone consider what you’ll ingest as a means of early morning sustenance, not that it matters, not like you have much of a choice.

Ninety percent of breakfast is just dessert dressed up like a full meal anyway, trying to weasel its way closer to the bottom of the food pyramid. And don’t get me wrong, I love dessert, I love Dunkin Donuts. But you give them to me for breakfast, the entire trajectory of my day is ruined. Now what am I supposed to eat for actual dessert? How am I going to be able to satisfy my ever intensifying sweet tooth when the stuff I’m being presented as a treat bears little difference to the four pieces of frosted cake I’ve just eaten this morning for breakfast?

No, I’m throwing in the towel on behalf of breakfast. Let’s just give it up, OK, we’re not doing anything productive in the morning, and we’re not fooling anybody by telling ourselves that the giant bowl of Waffle Crisp I shoveled into my mouth this morning is doing my body any nutritional good.

I blame the workday. I blame the morning. Do you think anybody wants to wake up and go straight to work? No, nobody does. And then by the time we get home, we’re exhausted, way too tired to even think about making something decent for dinner. You know what? Screw dinner, that’s not a meal either, it’s just a daily struggle not to feel guilty about all of the money we’re throwing away every night on take-out.

Just give me lunch, OK, that’s all I need, a giant lunch, like three sandwiches, I want a whole bag of chips. Right, chips aren’t exactly that healthy, but whatever, it’s the middle of the day, it’s my only real time to myself, out in the sunlight, feeling like an actual human being. I’ll eat whatever I want for lunch, all right, just don’t talk to me about breakfast anymore. Most important meal of the day? Ha. More like least important meal of the day. Ha.