“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day” has been said to me since I was a little girl, and for better or for worse my health required me to eat three meals a day. The meals that made up my breakfast have changed throughout the years, but breakfast remains consistent. Here is a quick rundown of what and who breakfast has meant throughout my many years of breakfast experience.Â
Starting with elementary School and sixth grade my breakfast switched between toast and a random packet pulled from a variety pack of Quaker’s oatmeal. There was a week in fourth grade where I ate toast with peanut butter, banana, and honey and tried to save it exclusively for testing weeks. Breakfast at this age was spent with my mom desperately trying to get us out the door to take us to school before she went on to complete her work for the day, or my dad leaving for work with a grab and go breakfast on especially early mornings. Â
Halfway through sixth grade through to my freshman year of high school I switched to yogurt and drinkable yogurts. I was waking up insanely early and struggled to stomach food that was physical food. I needed something drinkable or resembled the consistency of applesauce with a little more substance for my blood sugars. As a result of the super early mornings, I was riding in the car with my dad to his work with a pit stop at the middle school. It made it easy to get into the car and go to school with my breakfast finished before I got to school.
Covid started in the spring of my freshman year of high school, and my family was in the middle of redoing our house. This caused us to move between our home on the weekends and an apartment unit that my parents own to fix up and allow the contractors to finish the work in our house and comply with Covid regulations. So official breakfast meals were put on hold. Through sophomore year, while classes were mostly online, my breakfast consisted of random assorted snacks throughout the day of whatever was in the house with some of the weirdest food combinations that I would never go with today.Â
Then, when school returned to in person during my junior and senior year, I went back to drinkable yogurts and a few granola bars. Mostly by myself since it slowly became me driving myself to school. I also during my senior year would steal snacks and eat during my New Visions classes during the week, which was nice even if it was at 10am instead of 6-7 am, my usual lonely breakfast time for this phase of my life. Â
College is a huge shift for anyone, but my breakfast has evolved and is finally at a beautiful steadiness now. The first semester was a boring Belvita bar, the little packets of four biscuits, usually either chocolate or blueberry. Then in the second semester my semester carried a 9:30 am class, and the requirement for an earlier breakfast time appeared. So, I started going to Hickey dining hall with one of my friends before class and then we would walk to class together.Â
Now in my sophomore year, the fall semester gave me even earlier classes with 8 am and 8:30s, which required an early breakfast time. So, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, my friend Morgan joined me for breakfast at Hickey before an education class we shared, on Mondays and Wednesdays I stuck to my smaller Belvita bars.
This past semester breakfast has expanded. Morgan and I typically agree on a time to meet in Hickey for breakfast and we sit, chat, and eat breakfast together. However, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we typically have a bit of a larger crowd that varies each week and between Tuesday and Thursday.
I always get two slices of toast (white bread), one with butter the other with Nutella or strawberry jelly and a small to medium size portion of scrambled eggs which I end up dousing in table salt. I also get a glass full of chocolate milk every morning without fail.
It is the highlight of my morning to sit at a table during the earlier hours of the morning, chatting with Morgan or other friends that join us. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, especially for me because it fuels me up with the warmest conversations and clears away the early morning drowsiness. If you ever find yourself in Hickey in the morning and see me and Morgan, please feel free to pull up a chair and join us for breakfast.
I thoroughly enjoy every time a new person joins us for breakfast and opens up about the moments of college running through their brain early in the morning from tasks for the day to stories from your childhood. I will forever be a breakfast person and am so grateful to share these early morning memories with such amazing people.Â