I of course had no capacity at age 7 to appreciate the social commentary that the author could have been making about defying the norms and challenging the status quo. Instead, the first time I moved out of my parents house I grabbed a bucket of ice cream from the dorm mini market and dug my spoon in it at 8am with a triumphant "Ha!" I might not have been nutritionally prepared to go to my 9am class, but I delighted in foregoing America's traditional breakfast options for my own interpretation of what breakfast could be.
Which was dumb. Outright stupid. What body would ever want its host to dump such crap in it first thing when it wakes up in the morning? And not just the day when I chose to eat ice cream, but all the days when I've forced cold carbohydrates or dairy into a digestive tract that hadn't woken up yet. I remember reading in my yoga journal last year that it's cruel to put anything cold into your body first thing in the morning, because the digestive tract hasn't warmed up yet and cold food makes it angry. Which makes perfect sense. My body does, after all, prefer a warm shower in the morning instead of a cold one.
I listened to my yoga journal for a month or so, preparing warm oatmeal in the morning as opposed to cold cereal. But one thing I couldn't get on board with was the suggestion that I should start eating vegetables for breakfast. I get it, I really do. When you first wake up in the morning, you need energy, and the best place to get that is from plants which produce their own energy.
But like almost every American I've ever known, we were raised to believe that you eat eggs, bacon, cereal, fruit, yogurt, toast and a whole bunch of other grains, fruits, dairy, and even dessert for the first meal of the day. So it was very difficult for me to force myself to ingest something green at such an early hour when I had been trained and conditioned to believe that you only eat green beans and broccoli for lunch or dinner.
Koreans, of course, think this is ridiculous (and rightfully so). They've been trained and conditioned to believe that the best way to start your day is not Folgers in a cup big enough to dunk your donut, but rather by ingesting something that on the previous day was receiving energy from the sun. So they eat greens, along with their staple of rice and kimchi. Energy + something to fill your stomach + something to aid your digestion first thing in the morning. It makes sense.
It also makes sense to eat the same types of food for all your meals. When did our culture begin thinking that we had to section off breakfast as this time of day when eat fewer or no vegetables? Why didn't the mantra "Momma always says, eat your vegetables" apply to the first meal of the day?
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| Kimchi sold in our market. Doesn't this look appetizing for breakfast? |
I researched (and by that, I mean I wikipedia-ed) breakfast in different countries around the world, and it seems that vegetables are eaten for breakfast mainly in Asian countries, sometimes in African and Middle East countries. Other than that, people in Europe, Australia, and the Americas tend to eat meats, fruits and dairy. I wonder if this is in any way related to the rate of obesity? Or related to energy and productivity in the workplace? Koreans, after all, don't need caffeine in the morning in order to wake up. Coffee here consists of pouring a tube of instant coffee (coffee-looking crystals that have the flavor of coffee but not the caffeine, plus copious amounts of cream and sugar) into a tiny paper cup, mixing it with scalding hot water and taking it like a shot. They usually don't have this for breakfast, however, and instead drink it after their lunch or dinner as a dessert.
I wish I could say that all of this pondering has encouraged me to change my lifestyle and that I will pledge to eat kimchi for breakfast for the rest of my days, but in a year full of so many changes to my daily routine, perhaps maintaining a bit of comfort when I first wake up in the morning is okay.
