Breakfast

Heather Arndt Anderson is a Portland, Oregon–based food writer. Her recipes have been published in the cookbook One Big Table: 600 Recipes from the Nation's Best Home Cooks, Farmers, Fishermen, Pit-Masters, and Chefs, and she is a contributing writer to the magazines The Farmer General and Remedy Quarterly. In her food blog, Voodoo & Sauce, the most popular posts are about breakfast.

Modern nutritionists proclaim breakfast the day’s most important meal, yet many Americans eat it on the run, if at all, and they exhibit little consistency in the foods they consume. In that, they’re much like people the world over. Arndt-Anderson surveys the history of breakfast, finding that over the centuries ideas about breakfast foods have run the gamut from simple cereals to elaborate repasts of meat, eggs, cheese, fruits, and vegetables. She recounts the story of the Kelloggs, whose unintended invention of cornflakes made dry cereal a staple in Western culture. The Chinese have always exhibited a fondness for rice gruel as their source of morning energy. Where people consume breakfast has evolved over the years, yielding a twentieth-century architectural innovation: the breakfast nook. Today people often dine out for breakfast, so the author catalogs various breakfast settings from fast-food restaurants to elegant venues for power breakfasts. She even details breakfasts in space and on death row.

• Series Foreword, by Ken AlbalaAcknowledgmentsIntroduction Chapter 1: History and Social ContextChapter 2: Around the World in a MealChapter 3: Breakfast at HomeChapter 4: Breakfast OutChapter 5: Breakfast in the Arts and MediaNotesBibliographyIndexAbout the Author