...(3 meals a day) is largely a consequence of industrialization, which formalized the workday and drew much of the population away from home on a regular basis

...(3 meals a day) is largely a consequence of industrialization, which formalized the workday and drew much of the population away from home on a regular basis. Preindustrial America was more rural and agrarian, and people worked during daylight hours, pausing midmorning and later in the afternoon. “It was more like a two-meal kind of schedule that was based on outdoor physical labor and farm labor, and those meals tended to be quite big,” Bentley told me. With at minimum 1, but often 2 of the 3 meals a day model spent away at work/school, it’s hard to see this as immediately worse to say the least.