May 30, 2007
Dashboard Dining

I’m a big time breakfast guy.  Slathering a slice of whole-wheat toast border to border with oh-so creamy peanut butter is as much an every morning happening as scrubbing the ivories in front of the bathroom mirror. But now, according to no less an authority than CBS, toast is, well, toast.  A recent early Sunday morning report on the “Tiffany” network, watched while relishing scrambled eggs, bacon, orange juice and coffee, reported market researchers claiming toast for breakfast has slipped from being a part of 26% of all morning meals ten years ago to just 13% today.  

Stories like this make one imagine two school children talking at recess.  “My Dad’s a doctor he saves lives.  What does your Dad do”?  “My Dad has a really important job too, he spends every day asking people what they had for breakfast.” 

Don’t think it’s just toast doing a disappearing act from our nation’s breakfast table.  The story is just as grim for cereal.  The folks at Kellogg’s and General Mills are discovering more Americans skipping breakfast, twelve per cent, than those including Cheerios, Wheaties, Corn Flakes and Raisin Bran in their first meal of the day, ten per cent.  It was not disclosed if the cereal stats included those saving their “bowl of breakfast flakes” craving for after dark and the ten o’clock news but a random sample of the two people at our house finds that percentage to be at one hundred.   

The big breakfast, the one stuffed down before heading to the “south forty” and a day of bailing hay is gone, except for the weekly Sunday morning sit down, a tradition in some families.

Today’s breakfast is a meal consumed on the go, something to be dealt with without delaying the day’s start.  What folks are really looking for is a no-nonsense meal geared not to appetizing taste, the main requirement seems to be filling the tummy enough to stave off hunger pangs until lunch. 

The prime requirements for today’s morning meal are it be available at a drive up window and small enough to fit in one hand.  And should both hands be required for the steering wheel during morning rush hour today’s breakfast must be the right size and shape to fit in the car’s cup holder.  

Many different outlets, under many different brandings, market the hold in one hand breakfast.  Yet no purveyors of the first thing in the morning sandwich have opted to name their creation my own favorite moniker for the now familiar combination of eggs, sausage and cheese on a half toasted bun, the “gut-bomb”. 

On a drive to central Iowa an early morning stop was made at a drive-up window in Ft. Morgan.  While the meal itself was downed before the Brush exit, all across Nebraska and well into the land of the Hawkeye every passenger and driver continued to experience a recurring “taste of Colorado” as we burped our way through America’s heartland. 

“Dashboard dining” is a way of life in our land.  One should expect that when cell phones in cars have been outlawed the next logical step in our governments unending battle to protect us from ourselves is a ban on the mobile breakfast.  Could any activity be more distracting to a driver attempting navigation of the Redlands Broadway bridge construction than putting syrup on their pancakes?