We say this to you as an amorphous gas being who has been repeatedly chastised for our feelings on the matter, but jumping out of bed and force-feeding ourselves straight away has just never been of interest to us. In fact, though our love of breakfast foods for lunch and dinner (brinner if you’re nasty) is well-documented and legendary, eating straight away in the morning actually makes us nauseous. We’ve mentioned this to people on occasion, though, and usually get back some speech about how that’s simply not possible; how we should all love eating some carbo-loaded bowl of sugar cereal ASAP in the AM; how breakfast is the most important meal of the day!
We’re lumping this one in with the “if you don’t drink milk, your bones will disintegrate” hype of the ‘80s and ‘90s, though, and calling bulllllllllshit on that. Folks, you’re parroting a marketing statement that was probably cooked up by the suits at General Mills or Kellogg’s or, God forbid, Post. You’re furthering the agenda of Big Brekkie at every turn, when you could, like us, be enjoying eggs or brekkie b’s whenever the heck you were ready to eat them. We mean, think about it—who among us wants to fill up with some kinda sawdusty Otis Spunkmeyer (a real brand, btw) muffin and then spend the day doing stuff? We eat one of those muffins, the only thing we’re doing in the immediate thereafter is napping it the eff down—and, brother, we mean HARD.
But we wanted to gather more info than our anecdotal ante meridian angst, so we’ve read some things and we’re going to talk about them now. Do note, if brekkie works for you, go wild. Eat it. The main point of this week’s The Fork, though, is in giving the non-brekkers permission to get real, and to encourage the naysayers in their lives to stop all the naysaying. It’s great you like to eat in the morning—leave the rest of us alone!
Sure, skipping breakfast can mess with kids, according to the Food Research & Action Center, but have you met kids? Doing or not doing anything is bad for them! Does eating breakfast help them in school? It does, says FRAC, but, like, this is for the adults, man, and the adults who know their bodies. So, keep feeding your kids in the morning, but leave your buds alone.
Because it turns out there’s all kinds of other things to consider. Like, did you know that the people most likely to eat breakfast are non-smoking women who are taking their weight into consideration? At least that’s what the National Library of Medicine says. That same study says that it seems negligible in men. Do people who don’t eat breakfast stand to gain more weight? The studies says they probably do, but some of us aren’t living or dying based on how much we weigh!
Brass tacks? No meal is more important than any other, according to Good RX-dot-com, who spoke with nutrition experts and doctors. What’s their basic take, you ask? Breakfast can start the day off right, sure, and you might have a little more energy to start, but every last scientist agrees that morning people are butts, and their insistence that they have some kind of moral high ground—especially in tandem with their trite little sayings like, “an apple a day and all that,”—are fucking irritating, and you should stop telling people when to eat. (Disclaimer: None of the scientists actually said that stuff. It’s a joke.)
It’s like, do you remember when we you were young and your mom or dad or whoever would make you eat everything on your plate even if you weren’t still hungry? How badly do you think that messed some of us up? Badly, bro. Badly. And don’t get us started on cereal! Sure, it’s quick (and according to this one study has actually helped people up their calcium consumption because of all the milk), but it’s also full of sugars and refined carbs and processed this and that. To add insult to that injury, in England, Snap, Crackle and Pop from Rice Krispies are superheroes, but they’re basically just a bunch of short-ass, second-string Keebler-lite hat enthusiast assholes in America, so we kind of got screwed there.
What were we talking about? Oh, right. Brekkie.
And while we’re spouting off about things we read about breakfast, peep this piece from Healthline-dot-com that says even though people who adhere to a brekkie schedule might have healthier habits overall, it’s really more about how they’re generally better at things like remembering to eat and writing things down. There’s no magic jumpstart to your metabolism at the bottom of the Carnation Instant Breakfast, and you can fully eat breakfast later in the day when most folks start calling it lunch. Dang, language, especially relating to our perception of time, is wild. What if you’re a graveyard shift person? Can you eat your oatmeal when you get up for work in the afternoon? Does that count? There’s no research about that (that we bothered to look up), so eat your oatmeal when you wish and laugh heartily, dear readers. We’re all gonna eat next just as soon as we can. Oh, but we’ll WRECK an egg sammie, though. We’ll wreck it at night.
Seriously, these old milk commercials had us convinced we’d collapse like rubber as our bones turned to dust if we weren’t quaffing milk at every turn.
Also
-Looks like As Above So Below (formerly Altar Spirits) is getting into the absinthe game with an upcoming event featuring the reportedly semi-hallucinogenic bevvie. As Above So Below’s own Absinthe Verte is the star of the show from 6-11 pm on Friday, Oct. 13. And in addition to the tasting, there will be tintype photos, hand-poke tattoos from Talis Fortuna and more going down. Expect traditional absinthe service, too, which, if movies have taught us anything, is a whole freaking thing but pretty cool to watch.
-Ohhhhh, dip, the Four Seasons Resort Rancho Encantado is doing this whole big/cool BBQ collab between chefs Andrew Fox and Jack Arnold. On Sunday, Oct. 22 from 11:30 am-2 pm, you can get down to rock that special BBQ jazzzzz. Click here to get down on that.
-Tesuque’s El Nido has an enticing upcoming event on Saturday, Oct. 14 that brings artist Christie Nell and musician Nacha Mendez together for a trunk show/jam followed by a 6 pm four-course dinner. The New Moon Harvest Dinner Celebration+Trunk Show comes with blue corn sopes, wild salmon sashimi, juniper-rubbed elk tenderloin and chocolate freaking mousse. At $85 per person, we understand it’s not a dinner for everyone, but if you are some kind of Daddy Warbucks type and you go, tell us how it went. We’ll be eating Vienna sausages straight out of the tin.
-If’n you like butter, and many do, be aware that butter maven and member of local commercial kitchen The Kitchen Table Aga Smör has an upcoming butter-centric event at Santa Fe’s GF Contemporary. The aptly titled Butter Pop-Up will fully elevate your idea of butter and what it can do and taste like and be and achieve and all that. More info here.
-We’re pretty sure literally nothing else happened in the food sphere this week, so just hang tight and we’ll catch y’all next week. Don’t write us about this joke.
And we don’t give a...about trying to top that.
More Tidbits
-Do you like those Girl Scouts Raspberry Rally cookies? WELL IT’S OVER. Seems the ol’ GSA has discontinued the cult fave, and that’s too bad. So long as they keep Samoas, though, we’ll be OK.
-Oh, good—Chipotle has a burrito-makin’ robot now. That’s precisely what we need. It’s a funny choice from a company that only settled its child labor allegations in August. Like, what does this company have against hiring normal-aged human people to make burritos? Le sigh. Well, we suppose it’s better to have a robot making burritos than kids. Anyway, as always, you can get a better burrito so many places in this world.
-Do you know about the 10 Under 20 Food Heroes Awards? It’s pretty much what it says it is—an award that goes to 10 people under the age of 20 who have done cool stuff for the food insecure. This year’s batch is a good one, so here’s the list for you to read and agree with us about.
-Egads, the state of California is banning four food additives, including red dye 3, which will impact something like 12,000 products, such as Peeps (who cares?). What’s in your pantry? You might wanna learn what red dye 3 is all about—ditto propylparaben, brominated vegetable oil and potassium bromate, all of which have been a no-go in Europe since way back. Companies will have until 2027 to find workarounds, and we salute CA for keeping it real this way.
A Totally Scientific Breakdown of The Fork’s Correspondence
In the print edition of SFR this week, find out why Santa Fe Bees is the dang best. It might have something to do with the blue corn flautas, you’ll just have to read it and see.
Number of Letters Received
42
*That’s three weeks in a row. Are...are you all OK?
Most Helpful Tip of the Week (a barely edited letter from a reader)
“You write that queens are stupid? Kings are stupid, too!”
*We are in agreement.
Actually Helpful Tip(s)
Not a tip, but we heard from Lauren, who won the Tia Sophia’s restaurant gift certificate giveaway from last month, and we’re told that a good time was had by all involved.
*You’ve no idea how happy it made us to hear that, Lauren!
More like meh’kfast,
The Fork
