Beans on toast is suitable for breakfast, lunch or dinner. One wouldn’t, however, take any pleasure in having it 3x in one day. Not beans again! A dish which grew in popularity during the second world war, beans on toast is not only a cheap source of protein, but also, a vital feeling of security in desperate times. It is a dish which has no hidden ingredients or pretension — a name which is forthright about its contents.
For the second issue of Breakfast B Reading Series I’ve put together a playlist called 3x a Day. According to the order of the tracks, each song in this playlist are associated with one of the three meal-a-day routine.
A sense of disgust and alienation in Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Pure Jam was served for breakfast to open this Zoom call:
“This must be the ugliest piece of bread I’ve ever eaten / Wrapped in a foil-like substance / It’s an unidentified object / Shapelessly square.”
For lunch, an infantile protest by The Shape’s titled Wot’s for Lunch mum?
“Wot’s for lunch mum? / Not beans again! / Why can’t we have, decent stuff like meat?”
And finally, for dinner {the track which will close out the call}, in an act of soft perversion by David Wojnarowicz’s band 3 Teens Kill 4, a can of beans becomes an instrument:
“I like to shake a can of beans / every now and then I like to shake a can of beans / and shake it up and down.”
Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner are the baseline rhythms of life in the West. It is a sequence of rituals invented simultaneously by colonization, industrialization and 1960s advertising culture. Non-European cultures who ate somewhat intuitively when hungry were perceived as lacking civilized structure by colonists while gluttonous industrialists wanted to ensure that factory productivity would not be interrupted by unstructured mealtimes. Thus the European three meal-a-day program was forcefully imposed on indigenous peoples and the industrial working class as a tactic of domestication. Today, these rituals fit into our 9-to-5’s without too much interference. We arrive to work already having had breakfast, break for lunch when we’re told, and throw together dinner once home. Left uninterrupted, these rituals play on repeat endlessly.
