Our rigid eating habits date to the Industrial Revolution \u2013 it\u2019s time to embrace culinary spontaneity<\/p>\n
\u2018One of the stupidest things in an earnest but stupid school of culinary thought is that each of the three daily meals should be \u2018balanced\u2019.\u201d So argues American food writer MFK Fisher in her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf. She goes on: \u201cIn the first place not all people need or want three meals each day. Many of them feel better with two or one and one-half, or five.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fisher wrote her book ostensibly as a guide on how to feed yourself pleasurably and nourishingly during a period of food shortages caused by war, but there is much in her insightful advice to inspire and provoke us today. More than 80 years later, threats to the sacred breakfast-lunch-dinner mode of eating can still make the news: \u201cA nation of snackers: Britons no longer eat three meals a day\u201d, gasped one recent headline in the Times. Deviations from the \u201cstandard\u201d model are the subject of research by academics<\/a> and health professionals, and food retailers commission studies in an attempt to understand (and shape?) when and how customers consume their food.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/228e7f73cbf16ed60b2821748ed5a50612ae483e\/179_0_1531_1224\/master\/1531.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=5d331769b6dab8c48b734677f84dedb9\" "\\"Should")
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