Mother Jones isn’t typically known for their health and nutrition articles, so you knew something was up the moment they published an op-ed on the wisdom of eating three square meals a day. Dietitians have long encouraged Americans to think beyond the boundaries of this tradition; for many years, the trend was to fight hunger with smaller, more frequent meals. But as was obvious from the subtitle to the piece, this isn’t just about what’s good for your waistline.
Kiera Butler’s article is titled “Why You Should Stop Eating Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner,” but it’s subtitle reads: Dogmatic adherence to mealtimes is anti-science, racist, and might actually be making you sick. Anti-science? Okay, we’ll see what Butler has found to back that up. Completely plausible, though, because we engage in many traditions that aren’t exactly backed by research. Might actually be making you sick? Fine, fine, we’ll see. Racist?
Racist?
As atheists are fond of parroting, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Let’s see what kind of evidence Mother Jones has found to back up the claim that adhering to a three-meals-a-day schedule makes you a racist.
The bulk of the article’s evidence is pulled from Abigail Carroll’s book, Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. And it is Carroll who insists that European settlers marveled at the eating habits of Native Americans:
They observed that the eating schedule of the native tribes was less rigid—the volume and timing of their eating varied with the seasons. Sometimes, when food was scarce, they fasted. The Europeans took this as “evidence that natives were uncivilized,” Carroll explained to me in an email. “Civilized people ate properly and boundaried their eating, thus differentiating themselves from the animal kingdom, where grazing is the norm.”
Fascinating stuff. I’m reminded of historian Roger Ekrich, who found that our ancestors kept very different sleep schedules to the one we commonly follow today. Instead of sleeping in one uninterrupted chunk, humans used to divide their nighttime rest into two distinct episodes, often getting things done in between their dual slumbers. We take many of our cultural norms for granted, assuming that it’s always been this way, rarely asking an important underlying question: why?
But while it may be instructive to examine the reasons behind breakfast, lunch, and dinner, trying to link it to racism is a stretch that even the left rarely attempts. And this is a group of idiots who once claimed that it was racist for Republicans to support Herman Cain.
Europeans didn’t change their eating because of Native Americans. They merely kept eating the way they always had. The article goes on to make a decent case against this way of eating, but none of it has to do with racism or a hatred of Native Americans.
Alas, if you want to appear enlightened amongst your liberal friends, tell them you stopped eating breakfast in honor of our nation’s shameful, genocidal history. The heroes of this warped ideology seem to be those who are utterly indistinguishable from those mocking them.
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