Summary
Tim Hayward offers his reflections on the past, present and future of the British breakfast. Has the first meal of the day become a problem to solve rather than a pleasure?
Joined by food writer and breakfast historian Seb Emina, Tim finds out how the great British breakfast became the envy of the world. With its origins dating back to aristocratic Edwardian country houses, the cooked breakfast spread through the chop houses of working class London and beyond.
But with the huge amount of breakfast choices now available and our increasingly busy lives, eating breakfast has become an increasingly diverse and fragmented food experience.
For some breakfast is an exercise in "grab-and-go" and indulging in more of a "desk-fast" than a meal, but there are some other interesting trends underway; sales of the big name cereal brands have been falling, porridge sales have been making something of a comeback. For an insight into this trend, Tim meets Nick Barnard of Rude Health, one of the more recent players on the breakfast scene competing for our morning appetite.
With the help of food writer Anna Berrill, Tim finds out how, for some, the traditional breakfast is becoming more of a whole social occasion. Writer and comedian Chris Neill explains his own personal problem with breakfast and we learn how the so called "third wave" coffee scene is a growing influence on our mornings.
Producer: George Casey.
Transcript
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| 0:50.2 | podcast. A greater thinker than I once said, never do anything before noon that doesn't involve |
| 0:56.4 | sleep, sex or bacon. |
| 0:58.4 | And it's a rule I try to live by. |
| 1:00.8 | Any food scribbler, health nut, or celebrity chef can cheerfully tell you that breakfast is the most vital meal of the day, |
| 1:07.0 | but for me it's much, much more important than that. |
| 1:10.0 | In a world where our every movement is circumscribed and regulated by law, societal morays and the demands of family and working life, |
| 1:17.0 | waking up eating and mentally preparing for the day on your own terms is the last true freedom of the Englishman. On a decent breakfast |
| 1:25.2 | you can go out and invent the steam engine, build a bridge, map the human genome, |
| 1:29.8 | subjugator nation, or climb into the cockpit of a spitfire and face certain death with a |
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