Rethinking breakfast

It’s time to broaden our concept of what we eat in the morning, writes Anna Shepard

Picture your typical breakfast. A bowl of cornflakes, a glass of juice, maybe some toast and jam? This is what many of us have learnt breakfast looks like – light, sweet and often cereal-based. If there’s some leftover roast chicken in the fridge, or a saucepan of lentil soup on the hob, chances are you wouldn’t consider tucking into that until later in the day. But why?

Almost a quarter of us in the UK choose cereal for breakfast, according to a 2025 survey, making it our number one breakfast option [1].

There’s no denying that cold cereal is a quick morning food. It can also be a healthy way to start the day if you opt for a bowl of unsweetened muesli or make your own overnight oats (so easy as well as cheap; for two portions, just combine 100g oats with 350ml milk with a squeeze of lemon and a spoonful of maple syrup in a container with 2 tbsp chia seeds or other seeds and add fresh fruit of your choice in the morning).

But isn’t it time to break away from pre-conceived ideas of what our breakfast should be?

In many parts of the world, breakfast is simply the first meal eaten after waking up.

The division between food for the morning and what features on your plate for lunch and dinner barely exists. In Heather Arndt Anderson’s book Breakfast: A History, she explores eating traditions in the morning around the world, ranging from a platter of feta, olives, figs and cucumber, or fresh flatbread with labneh, enjoyed across the Middle East, to miso soup, grilled fish, rice and pickled vegetables in Japan. In India, breakfast is often potato curry, dahl and paratha (flaky flatbread), in northern regions; perhaps a dosa – pancake made from a fermented batter of rice and lentils – with chutney, in the south. A traditional Mexican breakfast might involve chilaquiles, crispy tortilla chips, fried in salsa, then topped with cheese, sour cream, onion and avocado. Who wouldn’t want to wake up to that?

All of these are breakfasts that are much more varied in flavours and textures than the default bowl of ready-made cereal. They also contain a food group that is notably lacking in the ‘normal’ British breakfast, namely vegetables (not counting the fried tomato and mushrooms in a ‘full English’).

Back in Britain, cereal companies have a lot to answer for.

Clever marketing has convinced many consumers that buying boxes of processed grains to eat after waking up is the thing to do. Before the Kellogg brothers launched their first mass-market Corn Flakes, in 1906, leftovers would have been a popular way to break your morning fast, whatever your social standing. Without fridges, time would have been of the essence in using up yesterday’s dinner.

For poorer families the main food at breakfast, lunch and dinner was always bread but it might be supplemented with vegetables, meat and smoked fish of various kinds. Watercress was another much-loved breakfast food for the poor in Victorian London. It was sold in bunches on the street and eaten from the hand like a piece of fruit.

“Mrs Beeton, the author of the endlessly-popular household guide and cookery book of 1861, recommended that cold roast or broiled beef was potted (ground up in a pot, seasoned and sealed with clarified butter to preserve it) and served on the breakfast table,” says food historian Eleanor Barnett, author of Leftovers: A History of Food Waste and Preservation. “Leftover beef would be fried up with cabbage to make Bubble and Squeak, a dish that would remain popular into the 20th Century, although started using potato instead of beef,” adds Eleanor.

Changing habits

But these traditional ingredients couldn’t compete with the convenience of tipping cereal into a bowl, particularly as our commutes lengthened during the 20th Century, and more women joined the workforce, leaving less time for morning meal preparation. Heartier breakfasts became a weekend thing, with cold ingredients, such as cereals, stepping in to fill the gap.

Miso soup, fish, rice, vegetables and pickles are a normal breakfast in Japan

According to Rupy Aujla, a London-based GP and podcaster on the subject of nutrition, breakfast cereals tend to be lower in protein and other nutrients than the foods we general cook (assuming that we cook). “You’re better off changing what you perceive as breakfast and eating the leftovers of last night’s dinner.”

Children are open to new breakfasts (if we let them be).

The good news is that very young children don’t necessarily share our narrow ideas about what counts as breakfast food. For a two year-old, broccoli dipped in hummus and mashed chickpeas on toast is a perfectly reasonable way to start the day, until our surrounding food culture teaches them otherwise. Research suggests that children may be open to trying vegetables earlier in the day. Loughborough University teamed up with eight local nurseries in 2023, to study 351 youngsters, aged from 18 months to four years-old, and found they ate carrot and cucumber more than 60% of the time when they were offered them at breakfast time [2].

It seemed that children were actually relaxed and open to new experiences in the morning. According to the study’s authors, the reluctant ones also imitated the behaviour of their peers. One child’s enjoyment of carrot sticks had a positive knock-on effect on the entire group.

Eating is social: The TastEd approach.

The heart of the TastEd method is about encouraging children to use their senses to explore new and different vegetables and fruits. It’s a relaxed approach, where peer modelling plays a big role. When one or two children in a class are brave enough to try a new food, it usually doesn’t take long before their friends join in. The TastEd classroom is also far from the pressure of a rushed school lunch, or a family dinner after a long day, when it can feel too stressful – both for parents and children – to experiment with new foods.

School breakfast clubs also encourage diverse eating habits through peer-to-peer influence, according to Greta Defeyter, professor of development psychology and director of the Healthy Living Lab at Northumbria University, who has been studying breakfast clubs for over 20 years.

“One of the big things that comes up time and time again is the importance of being there with your friends, modelling the behaviour, trying new foods because your friends do… you can change eating behaviour almost through osmosis, because children are looking at what each other are doing,” she says.

This year, the Government has committed to rolling out free breakfast clubs in all state-funded primary schools. 500 Best Start clubs are set to launch this April, meaning a total of 1,250 schools across the UK will be taking part, benefiting over 300,000 children [3].

What the Government hasn’t yet said much about is using breakfast clubs as a way to change and expand children’s breakfast food preferences. But school breakfast clubs could be a golden opportunity to change the way children perceive that all-important first meal of the day, moving away from sweetened ultra processed ingredients, towards real ones, including vegetables, pulses and grains. Perhaps lentil soup for breakfast is a step too far (though in Morocco, bean stew is a breakfast staple), but it’s certainly time to relax the rules and embrace whatever is most nourishing.