Laughing Matters: The One About Breakfast

By Ryan G. Van Cleave |  Illustrations by Darcy Kelly-Laviolette

November 2020 – Last Thursday, I decided to eat breakfast.

This might not seem like a true stop-the-presses moment, but I haven’t eaten breakfast since the first Star Wars movie came out, so for me, this was a noteworthy occurrence. There are many reasons for this longstanding morning-food boycott, but I’ll simply offer three that all have to do with what I was served as a child in the 1970s a la the unique cuisine style I affectionately call “weird.”

Reason 1: Kaboom cereal. A vitamin-fortified, circus-themed cereal with oat bits shaped into smiling clown faces? With marshmallow bears, elephants, lions, and (for some reason) stars? No, thank you. I’ll earn my way to adult-onset diabetes the old-fashioned way—by overeating normal food for decades versus partaking of two spoonfuls of this sugary nonsense. (A close second for worst cereal of the 70s? Sir Grapefellow, which had grape-flavored oats and “sweet grape starbits.” Challenger #3 is Crazy Cow, where multi-grain pellets had a powdered coating that dissolved in milk to create chocolate or strawberry milk.)

Reason 2: Spam and eggs with a generous dollop of Snack Mate pasteurized cheese spread atop the “meat.” I confess—that atomic-tangerine-colored fake cheese always came out in Cake Boss-worthy flowery designs that seemed almost too pretty to eat.

Reason 3: Fish stick “breakfast broil.” Yep. No further snarky commentary needed.

So, yeah, I got weaned off breakfast pretty quickly because I had both taste buds and common sense. Why suffer though this kind of fare when I could just hold out until lunchtime and get the true gems of 1970s mealtime options, like beef noodles & gravy Mug-o-Lunch, Libbyland Adventure Dinners (hooray for Safari Supper!), and some home-whipped ambrosia fruit salad? Maybe washed down with an orange Fanta (maybe a Tab), and perhaps chased by a handful of Dentyne Dynamints for dessert?

Wow, what a food flashback there.

Anyway, you’re probably wondering why I broke my three-decade anti-breakfast streak the other day. In That Fateful Moment, this was what was running through my mind when I saw neglected breakfast food there on the kitchen table, clearly unwanted since my wife—the only other person in the house—had left to do something else. 

I sniffed it. I eyed it. Then I poked it and said, “My God, that looks like the best Egg McMuffin ever.”

Now, I’ve never eaten an Egg McMuffin before (note anti-breakfast campaign above), despite us being the same age—invented in 1972 and introduced to the world in 1977! Yet for the first time in my life, I had this mental image of myself at age ninety-whatever, moaning about never having eaten an Egg McMuffin before. It suddenly seemed like an important thing to knock off my Food Bucket List.

Moments later, my wife returned to her only-temporarily-and-not-permanently-neglected breakfast and I stood there with egg on my face. Literally.

The “Oops!” I offered by way of apology did not suffice. Swiping someone’s breakfast is—apparently—a big no no. How would I know, being as breakfast ignorant as I am?

I did have one other close call with breakfast, and it happened a decade ago. Of all the breakfast eaters in my family, it was my father-in-law who loved it most. Anytime we visited him in Chicago, he’d insist on hitting up Denny’s, The Original Pancake House, Huck Finn Restaurant, or Jedi’s Garden. He’d have some version of eggs-and-whatever with a ridiculous name like The Beefy Boy B-fast, while I sipped water, enjoyed the ambiance, and wondered what terrible thing was wrong with me since everyone else in the entire place was slurping down grease-drenched food and loving every minute of it.

One time, he took me to a restaurant—just the two of us—and he told me I absolutely had to eat something or he’d be too embarrassed to eat, and he was really, really hungry. So, I caved. It was 11:05am-ish, which meant I could call it an early lunch, which made it feel semi-okay. 

“I’m game,” I said, examining the foreign food options. What WAS a Nutella Crepe? Which was less food—the Loaded Waffle or the Buttermilk Pancake Sandwich? What made a steak “country fried,” and why douse it with “gravy & eggs”?

I chose the Spicy Chorizo Scramblette, since it sounded more flavorful than Garden Omelet or Veggie Quiche. The Scramblette proved to indeed be quite packed with flavors thanks to the mix of green peppers, jalapenos, minced garlic, and fried potato cubes that I continued to enjoy for the next six burptastic hours, as my wife and in-laws can likely attest to. It was the stuff of culinary aftermath legend.

I suppose I’m finally realizing that I just don’t understand breakfast. That illicit Egg McMuffin? In the moment, not all that bad. In retrospect? Pretty meh. Same with what I call The Chorizo Nightmare. 

And, honestly, none of those 70s breakfast meals were all that lousy either. Maybe breakfast isn’t intrinsically evil. Maybe it’s okay for the world to go on eating poached eggs, packing away Pop-Tarts, and chomping croissants. I think that we can learn to get along, breakfast and I. So long as it stays on its side of the kitchen and I can safely remain on mine.

But I draw the line at suffering through silly breakfast jokes, like “A piece of toast and a hard-boiled egg walked into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Sorry, we don’t serve breakfast here.’”

If you’re inclined to perpetrate breakfast humor on the rest of us, I beg of you—at least be clever. Like this: 

What does a thesaurus eat for breakfast? 

Synonym rolls. 

That, my breakfast-loving friends, is humor of the truly yummy sort. That’s the type of morning meal I can get behind.

If you’ve got your own breakfast horror stories, by all means, don’t keep those to yourself. Contact me immediately at SpamAndEggs@scenesarasota.com with the sordid details. Bacon and grits sandwiches. Butter-slogged banana bread dipped in maple syrup. Eggs Sardou. Huevos Divorciados. 

I’m hungry to learn about your tales!