You Are What You Eat: The All-American Breakfast

Cereal commercials, nutritionists, and your mother all agree—breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That’s why Congress has declared September to be "All American Breakfast Month!"

That begs the question: what is the all-American breakfast, anyway?

The answer to that question has changed over the years. A cowboy in the 1880s may have munched on antelope steak and boiled coffee, while the Puritan settlers of the Seventeenth Century enjoyed a cornmeal mash called "hasty pudding."

Pre-packaged cereals began to change the American breakfast in the 1800s, but the convenience breakfast really took off in the 1960s. That turbulent decade gave us the Pop-Tart, the Carnation Instant Breakfast, and everyone’s favorite fake OJ, Tang.

In this article from The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America, Sylvia Lovegren details the history of the first meal of the day. Bon Appetit!

Breakfast Foods A twenty-first-century American might find a typical Pilgrim breakfast of cider, cornmeal mush, and maple syrup a bit spartan, but it would be recognizable. However, to a Pilgrim, a twenty-first-century breakfast of corn flakes with sliced banana, a toaster pastry, and a glass of orange juice would be almost incomprehensible. How we went from one to the other is the story of breakfast in America. And like the stories of many American foods, it involves a new continent, a mixture of scientific discoveries, vast waves of immigration from around the globe, with the addition of the Industrial Revolution and the American propensity for advertising and marketing.

When the first colonists arrived in the New World from Europe, one of the things they quickly discovered was that the foods they were used to were no longer available. Wheat for bread and porridge was difficult to grow. The pigs and hens that might provide breakfast meats and eggs were scarce. Milk cows were few and far between. Coffee and tea were simply too expensive and exotic to be imported. What the colonists did find in the new land was a new grain: Indian corn, or maize. And though at first they longed for their Old World wheat, they found that maize could be baked into bread, cooked into porridge, and prepared in many new ways, demonstrating that maize not only staved off hunger, it was also an appealing food.

The Native Americans showed the colonists not only how to grow the corn but also how to prepare it and grind it, how to cook it into cakes and pones, and how to stew it into what the Europeans had called porridge but which became known by the American term “mush.” Cornmeal mixed with water and a little salt and cooked into cakes or into mush was a typical breakfast throughout the early settlements. When fat was available, pieces of mush could be fried to an appealing crispness. As soon as the colonists had sweeteners—once they learned how to extract syrup from maple trees and once the beehives imported from Europe were producing honey—they used them to add interest and calories to their corn-based preparations.

In the new American colonies, the breakfast drink of choice for most was either hard cider or low-alcohol beer. Although the idea of starting the day with an alcoholic drink seems strange to us, at that time it made a great deal of sense: water contained no nutrients and was very often polluted; milk was considered a drink only for babies; and coffee and tea were expensive or nonexistent. But hard cider and beer, if drunk in moderation, were not high enough in alcohol content to be debilitating. They were cheap to make from easily available ingredients and, because of their natural yeasts and ferments, were rich in essential nutrients.

Early New England

As the colonies took hold and grew richer, the diets of the colonists improved and expanded. In New England, cornmeal mush—known as hasty pudding—was still popular, served with maple syrup or, later, with molasses. But with prosperity, the colonists added coffee and tea to their breakfasts. Breads, meat, and fruit pies became part of the breakfast menu as well. The breads were often cornmeal mixed with other grains, such as “rye ‘n’ injun” (hearth-baked corn-and-rye bread) or brown bread (steamed bread made with rye, corn, and wheat). The meat was likely to be salt pork. Exactly why fruit pies came to be such popular breakfast items in early American life has never been studied, but the answers are not difficult to guess: a pie made the day before could sit overnight without spoiling and was readily available to eat upon demand in the morning, with no further cooking. It was filling and relatively nutritious—containing fruit, sweetener, fat, and grain—and it tasted good. Breakfast in New England was typically an early affair, partaken when the farmers rose to begin their chores.

Early South

In the southern colonies, the settlers added tea and coffee to their cornmeal breakfasts, rounding them out more luxuriously than their northern cousins with eggs, meats, fruit, breads, and cheese. As slavery and the plantation system grew, the difference between northern and southern eating habits grew as well. The southern plantation owner would rise early to survey his holdings, perhaps breaking his fast with a julep—because the drink was supposed to protect against malaria—but his first real meal would be eaten later in the morning. With servants or slaves to help with the cooking, the southern kitchen became famous for its breakfasts: grits lavishly dappled with butter, succulent pieces of fried ham and redeye gravy, spoon bread or hominy soufflé, eggs and toast, grilled chicken or game, fried shrimps or oysters, and as many different types of sweet breads as the cook could imagine. When chocolate became known in the late 1700s, the expensive hot drink became another part of the sumptuous feast.

While the New England colonies had been settled by Protestants from England, whose frugal attitudes were reflected in their foods, the southern colonies were settled by widely differing groups. There the English colonists were often from wealthy families, and they proudly tried to duplicate the hunt breakfasts and landed-gentry style of the old country. Protestant refugees from France, known as Huguenots, also settled the area, adding a French touch to the emerging local cooking. Slaves from Africa and the West Indies not only added more elements to the southern cuisine, they provided leisure time for the slave owners to enjoy lavish meals.

Early Mid-Atlantic Region

In the Mid-Atlantic colonies the early settlers were the common-sense, middle-class Dutch and Swedes, followed by English settlers, who tended to be much more moderate than their northern neighbors and more middle class than their southern counterparts. The English colonists welcomed settlers from other lands, and soon the Mid-Atlantic areas filled up with Welsh, Irish, and Germans. Like their neighbors north and south, this very practical group of people ate cornmeal mush and cornbreads washed down with beer or cider, but they also brought with them a number of new foods that became identified with American breakfasts. The best known of these foods was the Dutch waffle.

Although in Europe waffles were primarily a dessert and feast food—dusted with powdered sugar or lavished with whipped cream—in America they were treated like many other quick breads and were served for breakfast garnished with syrup, either maple or the molasses that was appearing as a result of the slave trade in the West Indies. Waffles also became popular as a sort of bread, served topped with creamed items such as chicken or chipped beef.

Oliebollen (oil balls)—doughnuts without the hole—were another Dutch food that became common Mid-Atlantic breakfast fare. The New England doughnut with the hole in the middle was the one that became a regular part of American breakfasts, but some theorists believe that the Pilgrim settlers became fond of doughnuts during their stay in Holland and brought them to the New World. Dutch cooks also introduced deep-fried crullers sprinkled with powdered sugar.

Buckwheat pancakes were popular in the middle Atlantic region as well as in New England. Traditionally, they were made with a slightly sour yeast starter, and the batter had to be mixed at least twenty-four hours before the pancakes were cooked. Because the pancakes were considered heating to the system and the buckwheat grain was not harvested until late in the year, raised buckwheat pancakes were a winter breakfast dish. They were enormously popular throughout the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so much so that the English traveler George Makepeace Towle said in 1870, “It is hard for the American to rise from his winter breakfast without his buckwheat cakes” (Mariani, 1983). However, by the middle of the twentieth century buckwheat cakes had become something of an anachronism.

Breakfast in the Developing Nation

As the colonies developed into a nation, immigrants continued to enrich the American breakfast table. The Moravians settled in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina, bringing with them a sweet, yeast-raised coffee cake, known as Moravian sugar cake. In Philadelphia, where Ben Franklin was defending the American breakfast of coffee and corn cakes to mocking Englishmen, the yeast-raised Philadelphia sticky—or cinnamon—bun, a specialty of the Swiss and Germans, became breakfast staple.

In the South, the breakfast tradition of lavish hot breads continued. Beaten biscuits—so called because the dough was literally beaten with a rolling pin for thirty minutes or more—were the sure sign of a genteel, and slave-filled, kitchen. With the advent of chemical leavens at the end of the 1700s, the popularity of quick breads accelerated. Biscuits, pancakes, and waffles (which had formerly been raised with either yeast or beaten egg whites), chemically raised cornbreads, and cakes all became popular breakfast fare.

When Louisiana became part of the growing country in 1803, another rich contribution was made to the breakfast table. With its exotic mix of French, Indian, Spanish, French Acadians (or Cajuns), and free and enslaved Africans, Louisiana’s unique cuisine gave us French doughnuts, or beignets; calas (deep fried rice cakes dusted with powdered sugar); and pain perdu (French toast), all served up with Louisiana-style café au lait enriched with bitter chicory. The Louisiana breakfast table was also likely to feature pork sausage, grits and grillades (braised beef or veal with gravy), biscuits, and eggs. Another interesting dish was called coush coush, a kind of cornmeal mush enriched with eggs and served with molasses.

To visiting Europeans, the lavish American breakfasts were quite startling. One Scotsman reported on a visit he made to a humble backwoods home in the United States in 1811:

“Have you any eggs?” said I. “Yes, plenty,” replied she.… “Well,” said I, “just boil an egg, and let me have it, with a little bread and tea, and that will save you and I a great deal of trouble.” She seemed quite embarrassed, and said she never could set down a breakfast to me like that.… She detained me about half an hour, and at last placed upon the table a profusion of ham, eggs, fritters, bread, butter and some excellent tea. (Melish, John, Travels in the United States of America [1811], quoted in Mariani [1983])

Breakfast in the Old West

As restless Americans and newcomers moved west, away from the Eastern Seaboard, new challenges and new situations helped to develop new foods. Bishop’s bread, a kind of crumb coffee cake, was supposed to have been invented on the Kentucky frontier one Sunday morning when the circuit preacher dropped in unexpectedly for breakfast (although a similarly named sweet bread existed in Europe). But not everything was as appetizing as bishop’s bread. The Englishman Sir Richard Burton commented on a meal he was served in pioneer Nebraska:

Our breakfast was prepared in the usual prairie style: First the coffee—three parts burnt beans—which had been duly ground to a fine powder and exposed to the air, lest the aroma should prove too strong for us.… then the rusty bacon, cut into thick slices, was thrown in the fry-pan.… Thirdly, antelope steak, cut off a corpse suspended for the benefit of flies outside, was placed to stew within influence of the bacon’s aroma. Lastly came the bread, which of course should have been cooked first. (Graber, 1974)

Not all prairie breakfasts were as dismal as Burton’s, of course, but pioneering offered many challenges to the cook. Coffee was scarce and expensive, so substitutes such as parched corn, carrots, or okra were used. At first, wheat would not grow, so corn again became the primary grain. Corn mush or hasty pudding was common, and the leftovers were fried and served with sweetener of some sort. Cornmeal and pork scrapple also became a typical breakfast item. Molasses and honey were difficult to obtain, but pioneer cooks devised a type of syrup from corncobs, and some enterprising (or desperate) cooks even boiled down watermelon or pumpkin juice to make syrup for breakfast. Fresh fruit was hard to find on the trail west, but dried apples were plentiful, so dried apple pies became standard breakfast fare in the Midwest during the 1800s. Butter was scarce, but Native Americans taught the settlers to make butter from crushed green hickory nuts to spread on their corn bread.

Most of the new immigrants moving into the newly opened West were northern and middle Europeans from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Bavaria, and Bohemia and, a little later, Scandinavians from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. These countries all had strong baking traditions, and the immigrants brought those traditions to their new land. As the western territories were settled and the homesteads began to prosper, these cooks produced Swedish coffee cakes; Danish pastries; Austrian apple strudels; Bohemian kolaches (little pastry turnovers) filled with apples, prunes, poppy seeds, or cheese; Alsatian sour-cream cakes; Czech potato pancakes; and German puffed pancakes (Pfannekuchen) and jelly-filled doughnuts (also called Bismarcks).

Pork was a favorite meat in the new territories, but fish was often eaten for breakfast as well. Fresh-caught trout, rolled in cornmeal and fried to a turn in bacon fat, was a western trail item that found a permanent home in the new territories. Creamed salt or smoked fish—particularly cod or mackerel—was also popular, the creamy savory gravy being a perfect complement to bland potatoes or crisp toast.

In Texas and Oklahoma, beef was often the most commonly available meat, but in the 1800s beef came from tough, range-fed, and driven cattle. Chicken—fried steak—a leathery piece of beef that has been pounded to tenderness and then dredged in seasoned flour and fried like chicken-was the creative cook’s answer to that problem. Served with coffee, cream gravy, and biscuits or potatoes, chicken-fried steak made a filling, if slightly indigestible, breakfast.

Land of Plenty

The rich land and prosperous farms gave Americans the wherewithal to make huge breakfasts, the only limit being the cook’s imagination. With wheat joining corn as a widespread crop, with cows and their cream and butter plentiful, with chickens laying endless supplies of eggs, and with sugar becoming inexpensive enough to join honey, maple syrup, and molasses as a sweetener, cooks had at hand everything they needed for producing bounteous meals. They rose to the challenge.

Breakfast breads seemed to come pouring out of American ovens. Sally Lunn—a sweet, cakelike, yeast bread—was very popular, as were other sweetened breads made with yeast doughs, such as cinnamon rolls and sticky buns. Toast, of course, was common, but it was served not just spread with butter and preserves but also as milk toast (hot buttered toast dipped in hot milk) or even what was called buttered toast—which meant toasted bread dipped in a sort of butter gravy. Bread could also be made into French toast or Mennonite toast (deep-fried French toast).

Biscuits were popular throughout the United States, some made with sour milk and soda and others with sweet milk and baking powder. They were as likely to be served with butter and preserves as they were to be split and covered with creamed chipped beef, a northern specialty, or fried chicken with gravy in the South. Beaten biscuits continued to find favor in the South, where there were slaves or servants, and biscuits enriched with sweet potato were also common.

At first, “muffins” meant what we call English muffins—yeast bread cooked in a ring on a griddle before being split and toasted. The sweet, cupcakelike quick bread we know as muffins were called “gems” in the 1800s—although, confusingly enough, gems could also be a sort of eggless popover. Gems or muffins offered endless opportunities for variation to the cook and were made with blueberries or cranberries in New England and enriched with cornmeal or whole-wheat flour in the Midwest or huckleberries in the Northwest. Popovers—a sort of individual Yorkshire pudding—usually served with butter and preserves, seem to have made their appearance in the mid-1800s.

Waffles and pancakes of every stripe were made, but except for yeast-raised buckwheat pancakes, most were leavened with egg white, soda, or baking powder, earning them quick-bread status. In the 1800s, waffles and pancakes were much more prevalent than they were in later years and were ready vehicles for the creative cook’s talents. Rice and cornmeal were frequently used to make them up, as were bread crumbs that had been soaked overnight in buttermilk. An interesting recipe for snow pancakes was fairly familiar in northern climates—freshly fallen snow took the place of eggs in the batter, using the air trapped in the snow crystals to leaven the dough. Snow fritters, deep-fried batter made with snow, were also enjoyed, as were fritters made with everything from apples to tomatoes to corn to oysters. Some cooks served sweet fritters dusted with powdered sugar, while others passed syrup or molasses and butter.

To go along with the hot breads, hearty meats were served. Bacon, salt pork, sausages, and ham were perhaps the most widely eaten breakfast meats, but there were others, depending on the region of the country, that graced the breakfast table: in New England, corned beef hash or codfish balls; in the Mid-Atlantic region, creamed chipped beef or a Porterhouse steak; in the South, fried chicken or chicken hash; and in the Midwest and West, pan-fried fish, broiled oysters, liver and bacon, or lamb chops.

To top it all off, a few eggs (sunny-side up, over easy, scrambled, or soft- or hard-boiled), potatoes in many different guises (sometimes boiled, but often hashed), fruit in compotes or in sparkling jellies or preserves, and even a mild vegetable or two, along with pies or doughnuts and, in many places, cookies, would make a hearty meal. Coffee, tea, or hot chocolate would round out the repast.

Land of Plenty… of Stomachaches

When most of the population was performing heavy labor on farms, the huge breakfasts that Americans consumed made some sense. But as people moved into the city and took up a more sedentary life, yet still ate as though they were working on the farm, there was trouble. It was no wonder that dyspepsia became one of the most common complaints of the 1800s. To the rescue of suffering dyspeptics came Sylvester Graham, who had learned about the gastric benefits of whole wheat from the Shakers. Graham’s work made what would come to be known as “Graham” flour a common item in the nineteenth-century pantry. Although graham crackers would be his most lasting contribution, Graham gems, Graham muffins, and Graham bread made with his flour all became common breakfast fare in the 1800s.

Graham crackers and apples made up the breakfast diet of John Harvey Kellogg before he took over the new Seventh-Day Adventist sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1876. At first, the “San,” as it was called, served porridge, milk toast, and boiled rice for breakfast but Dr. Kellogg was anxious to find something that would be quick to prepare and would vary the patients’ diet. His first invention was called Granula and consisted of twice-baked graham cracker nuggets that had to be soaked in milk overnight to make them edible. Next came the real breakthrough: Dr. Kellogg and his brother, Will Keith Kellogg, had the idea of running softened boiled wheat through a rolling machine and then baking the flattened product. The result was the first flake cereal. The Kellogg Company marketed its first Toasted Corn Flakes in 1906, the foundation for what would become the largest manufacturer of ready-to-eat cereals in the world.

One of Dr. Kellogg’s patients at the San was Charles William Post—who became convinced that healthy breakfast foods could make him rich. After leaving the sanitarium, he set up business in Battle Creek, where he developed an ersatz coffee based on toasted wheat and molasses, not unlike the “coffees” used by the pioneers, which he called Postum. Following Postum’s success as a noncaffeinated alternative to coffee, Post tried again with another grain beverage. Although Grape-Nuts did not take off as a coffee substitute, it was a huge hit as a breakfast cereal.

With Post and Kellogg making big profits, other cereal entrepreneurs tried their hands as well, many of them moving into Battle Creek for the magic of the name. One of them came up with a celery-flavored hot cereal called Tryabita which, needless to say, failed. Still, many others did not, and the American breakfast table was changed forever.

Manufactured Food

At the close of the 1800s, a combination of events was taking place that would bring industry into the kitchen, especially to the breakfast kitchen. The Industrial Revolution had made factories and factory life a commonplace; transcontinental railroads transported factory products coast to coast; although many Americans still lived on farms, the cities were beginning to take over as population centers; the United States Department of Agriculture and the home economics movement were promoting scientific cooking as the cleanest and the best; and women were just starting to work outside the home. The race was on to find the products that would simplify the American woman’s life, while giving her family quick, nutritious meals.

Kellogg and Post, of course, offered their ready-to-eat cereals, but they were by no means the only bringers of change. In 1889, Aunt Jemima pancake mix went on the market, only a year after Log Cabin syrup was first sold. The Quaker Oats Company started selling their breakfast oats in 1891, followed two years later by the first box of Cream of Wheat. Industry came even more visibly to the breakfast table in the form of the electric toaster in 1908 and the mechanical refrigerator—which could keep cold the additional milk that families were using as an unintended side effect of increased cereal consumption—in 1918.

The march of new products continued, with malt-flavored Malt-O-Meal hot cereal in 1919 and the first packaged, sliced bacon in 1924. Wheaties, the “Breakfast of Champions,” also was introduced in 1924, followed in 1928 by Rice Krispies, which made noises described as “snap, crackle, pop,” and, in 1930, by two biscuit mixes, Jiffy and Bisquick. The latter two were considered almost miracle products by many cooks, who could whip up biscuits, pancakes, waffles, coffee cakes, and muffins with little fuss and at the drop of a hat.

Exotic imported bananas had been the rage—for breakfast as well as for other meals—in the 1890s, but canned fruits became popular at the end of the century as well, with canned pineapple becoming particularly fashionable in the 1920s. Fruit juices had never been particularly appreciated, at breakfast or any other time, but with the rising popularity of canning, the interest in healthful foods and in the newly discovered vitamins, and, strangely enough, the advent of Prohibition in 1920, canned fruit juice came to be considered an elegant addition to the breakfast table. One of the most common of the juices was grape, which was sold “as is” by desperate vineyards that could no longer sell wine. Sunsweet prune juice and tomato-based V8 both debuted in 1933, just as Prohibition was ending—but by then Americans had become used to drinking fruit juices at all times during the day as a substitute for alcoholic drinks. The crowning achievement, of course, in fruit juice history and perhaps a defining moment in the American breakfast came with the development of frozen orange juice after World War II.

New Immigrants—From Breakfast Doughnut to Breakfast Bagel

Industrialization and the move to cities were not the only things changing the face of American breakfast habits. The new immigrants flooding into the country in the early part of the twentieth century were having a profound impact as well. Bagels and blintzes were two breakfast staples contributed by Eastern European Jews; though, at first, these items would be most associated with New York City, by the latter half of the twentieth century both would be thoroughly Americanized. Bagels with lox (a type of smoked salmon) and cream cheese was a delicious and original combination developed by American Jews in New York City, according to The Dictionary of American Food and Drink. Frozen bagels made by large agribusinesses are available across the country, but bagel connoisseurs agree that nothing beats a freshly made bagel from the corner deli.

Blintzes are less common than bagels, but these thin pancakes wrapped around a cheese filling and usually garnished with fruit compote were popular enough that they became a regular breakfast item at such chains as International House of Pancakes and Denny’s. Challah bread and potato pancakes (latkes) are two other Jewish specialties that have become part of the American breakfast table.

On the West Coast, Chinese cooks made the egg-vegetable cakes known as egg foo yong a popular breakfast dish. Later in the twentieth century, the Chinese restaurant breakfast and brunch specialties known as dim sum became extremely fashionable. The Italian omelet called the frittata, also made with vegetables, became another West Coast specialty, particularly in San Francisco. An Italian savory bread pudding, called cheese strata, started turning up in community cookbooks all through the 1960s and 1970s.

Throughout the Southwest, rancher-style eggs, or huevos rancheros, became a standard breakfast dish, usually served with refried beans and tortillas. The Denver omelet—an omelet folded over a mix of ham and peppers-became a breakfast staple as well, and it, like blintzes, was soon found on chain-restaurant breakfast menus. The Mexican influence in the Southwest was also felt with the introduction of the breakfast burrito—a tortilla wrapped around eggs, salsa, sausages, chiles, and other garnishes. For many years this dish was confined to the Southwest, but it has become popular as far away as New York City.

There is a great deal of controversy over who introduced one of the most enduringly popular of twentieth-century breakfast items, eggs Benedict. Whether it was the Creoles of New Orleans or restaurateurs in New York City, the dish has been a standard for fancy breakfasts for nearly one hundred years, as well as a constant at brunch.

Modern Breakfast Tables

If the end of the 1800s signaled a new era in the American breakfast, with the invention of ready-to-eat packaged cereals, the 1960s heralded the modern age with a vengeance. The decade opened with a bang with the release of Coffee Rich, an instant nondairy creamer, followed by the competing brands Coffee-mate and Cremora, all of which were perfect to stir into the instant coffee that became so popular after World War II. In 1964 Kellogg introduced Pop-Tarts, the first successful toaster pastry (Post had tried six months earlier with Country Squares, which failed). And in 1965 the space age orange juice substitute Tang took the kid’s breakfast market by storm, accompanied that same year by the breakfast-in-a-glass drink for young moderns in a hurry: Carnation Instant Breakfast. Suddenly a complete—or at least filling—breakfast could be assembled from packaged products, with no work or dirty dishes.

Restaurants were quick to notice this hurry-up trend in American breakfasts. Both the International House of Pancakes and the southern chain, the Waffle House, got their start in the mid-1950s, specializing in breakfast served any time of the day. In the mid-twentieth century, diners and truck stops—located near the newly built highways and freeways—served dishes like “Adam and Eve on a raft with some joe” (poached eggs on toast with coffee) to the thousands of Americans on the move. Breakfast “on the go” got a boost when 7-Eleven stores started selling takeout coffee in 1964, along with a variety of packaged coffee cakes and sweet breads. The 7-Eleven model was so effective that gas station mini-marts were soon catering to the traveler with little time to stop for a restaurant breakfast, with coffee, packaged donuts, Danish pastries, and coffee cakes. McDonald’s restaurants, the ubiquitous purveyors of lunchtime and dinnertime hamburgers, decided to offer three meals a day with the introduction of the Egg McMuffin in 1972. In a move to catch up to McDonald’s, which has average annual breakfast sales of more than $400,000 per store, Burger King experimented with offering hamburgers for breakfast, with a resultant rise in their breakfast sales of 4 to 7 percent.

Another modern breakfast trend has been for supersweet cereals. During the 1940s, cereal companies introduced a few mildly sweetened cereals aimed squarely at the children’s market, but that push accelerated greatly in the 1950s, particularly with the advent of children’s television programming and its accompanying commercials. Kellogg introduced Frosted Flakes in 1952 and Fruit Loops in 1963, General Mills gave us chocolate-flavored Cocoa Puffs in 1958, and Post brought Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles to the market in 1971, both tie-ins with The Flintstones cartoon program. Each year it seemed as though children’s cereals became sweeter, so that by the time Post debuted Oreo O’s in 1998 many cereals hardly seemed to be food any longer, but were simple sugary snacks.

There was some rebellion against the highly sugared breakfast offerings of the big companies, particularly in the 1960s, with the advent of a strong organic health food movement. Whole-grain granolas became popular during this period, and in the early 1970s a number of natural bakeries, including Barbara’s in California, started producing alternative cereals and baked goods. Ironically, one of the health food movements’ biggest sellers was the granola bar. Kellogg and General Mills picked up on that trend very quickly and were soon selling their own brands of cereal bars, promoted as the perfect breakfast on the go. In 2000, General Mills introduced perhaps the ultimate quick-breakfast item (short of a pill)—the Milk ‘n Cereal Bar, which was billed as just as good and nutritious as a real bowl of cereal with milk. It has been a huge hit. Technology has also given us microwaveable instant hot cereal, some already in its own plastic breakfast cup. Cold cereal in a cup is also available in a refrigerated cereal kit, which includes cereal in a plastic bowl with a container of milk and a plastic spoon.

The American breakfast table has indeed changed in the nearly four hundred years since the Pilgrims first landed. Many Americans eat no breakfast at all, while others have a quick breakfast of cereal, coffee, and perhaps fruit. The growing numbers of people who are too pressed for time to fix a sit-down breakfast instead fuel up on instant convenience foods. The lavish breakfasts of the 1700s to 1800s have been almost completely relegated to special occasions or to rare, leisurely brunches.