Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner: Breakfast

Clarissa Dickson Wright reveals the origins and development of our three daily meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner. As a nation, we take them for granted, assuming that they have always existed as they are now. But unpick each of these eating rituals, trace their lineage back through a thousand years of British history and you find surprising stories of social upheaval and shifting class structures, of technological developments and gastronomic revolutions. The origins of breakfast are the most mysterious of all. The particulars of our first meal of the day have changed dramatically over the centuries. From the earliest records of choirboys at St Paul's breaking their night's fast with bread and ale, through the heavily-laden morning tables of Jane Austen's era and the Edwardian age to today's packet cereals, our breakfasts have been influenced by religious strictures, ideas of social status and the opinions of those self-appointed experts who claim to know what is best for us.