The Problem With Brunch
By Melissa Wiley in Food on Sep 18, 2012 6:00PM
Contrary to what you may think, brunch is not real. In fact, it’s completely fictitious, as illusory as Alice’s Jabberwocky. In grammatical terms, brunch is a portmanteau, a term originally employed by an ill-fated Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass connoting a word that neatly combines two others as well as their meanings, much like the said English suitcase with dual compartments. In that vein, brunch remains an invention of the likes of the Mad Hatter, impishly merging two discrete meals and leaving your stomach one short.
The appeal and the problem with all portmanteaus, of course, is that they divest the two formerly distinct elements of their original characters. Case in point: Ever since Brad Pitt became the first three letters of “Brangelina,” his acting career has lost arguably all momentum. Did anyone actually pony up $15 to watch Moneyball on the big screen? Now a show of hands for Fight Club.
The axiomatic point is that you can’t surrender your individuality to a portmanteau and expect to exert the same influence once you decide to go solo again. Morphemes like “brunch” and “Brangelina” strip breakfast and Brad alike of their integrity. Personally we’ll leave Brad to sort out his own problems, but breakfast is a different story. Our brain just doesn’t function on a paltry cup of piping hot coffee alone. It needs something substantial to wash down.
The problem with brunch, then, is that it breezily dismisses the distinct identities of breakfast and lunch, designed as they are to sustain us through the critical morning and early afternoon hours at scientifically determined intervals. Brunch is, in short, your mother during a mid-life crisis. No more tailored tweed suits and embroidered tea toils. Now she’s writing folk songs in the shower, embracing retro formal wear, and calling you and your younger brother by the wrong names.
Brunch wreaks its peculiar form of havoc by trying to satisfy those who would rather have a proper breakfast as well as those preferring a fuller midday meal, meaning everybody loses. Like a messy divorce, this kind of compromise only punishes the innocent, in this case the blood sugar. So when we’re famished by 8:30 am and told to “wait until brunch—it’s only two hours away,” this is not helpful. It’s short-term starvation. Fortunately for those of us who need three solid meals a day, brunch can never win out entirely. After all, it’s typically only a Sunday affair.
Because brunch is essentially a social venture, however, it’s only polite to assent to its ill-timed demands on occasion. So we resist the urge to devour our full plate of bacon and eggs, opting instead for a parsimonious cup of yogurt at 9 am, realizing that by indulging in edible largesse at 10:30 am we’ll be ravenous for dinner by 4 pm and inevitably awake with hunger pangs by 5 am. But we’re rolling with it. We’re basically bonhomous creatures, as it happens. We also freely toss around indispensable portmanteaus like “bromance” and “craptacular” without a second thought. So if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. At least “linner” never caught on.
Photo by Derrick Blakley