First sentence of the article and already an error.
I break it down like this:
1. Breakfast is the first meal of the day. It's in the name. It doesn't matter when breakfast happens on the wall clock, but it's always the first meal.
2. Dinner is the principal meal of the day. It might be the only meal meal, but it's most often one of two or more meals in a day. It doesn't matter when dinner happens -- it's dinner in the morning, at high noon, in the evening, and at 3:00AM. It's easily the most important meal, if measured by size.
3. Supper is the last meal of the day. It's final. It can happen any time of day, too, but there's no meals after supper so it's usually late in the day.
4. Lunch happens somewhere in the middle of a day. This is a purely time-based distinction.
5. Brunch is exactly like lunch is, but it's a mostly a menu-based distinction with a hint of some wall-clock dependency like lunch has. Brunch can include eggs that are served as eggs. (Lunch, usually not so much: With the addition of eggs, lunch ceases to be lunch and becomes brunch.)
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In this way: A person can have a dinner of a big breakfast, skip lunch, and have supper later.
Or they can do the semi-normal breakfast, lunch, supper routine, with any of those meals serving as dinner. (Where I'm from, usually the last meal is the biggest -- but that's not universal at all.)
Or they can just eat once a day (semi-pro intermittent fasting), and that meal can be breakfast, dinner, and supper all at the same time. Maybe lunch, too, if it happens mid-day. (Maybe brunch instead of lunch, if it includes eggs.)
When a person has a light breakfast, a big lunch, and a bit of supper, then dinner happened at lunchtime.
It all fits.
Except: Skipping breakfast. That doesn't fit. The first meal is always breakfast. If any meals at all are eaten in a day, then one of them must be breakfast. (But breakfast doesn't have to happen in the morning, and it doesn't have to include any aspect of "breakfast food".)
Horses for courses though. I know plenty of people who don't eat breakfast but personally I found it much easier to not eat dinner.
And if what you’re really trying to say is that you like intermittent fasting (which can have eating windows at any part of the day even if the meme is to start eating at traditional lunch hours) the first meal, that meal which breaks your fast, is, by definition, breakfast. This could be your only meal if taking intermittent fasting to its extreme - further evidence for it being most important.
The other way in which breakfast is most important, IMO, is that it sets the tone for the rest of the day. To be more specific, the first meal that gets you onto the blood sugar/insulin rollercoaster will keep you on the rollercoaster all day until you fast again - so the quality of your meals (aka not starting your day with sugar bombs) is highly important.
Regardless, “important” is purely an opinion/values statement; the only error is claiming that a sincerely held opinion is an “error”.
Edit: after some recent travel experiences, I found that starting my day with a high quality salad (little dressing, whole fish, variety of vegetables, small portion) was transformative in keeping my blood sugar under control, maintaining stable energy level, and promoting healthy digestion.
Also there was a brief moment in my adult life when I had sleep for supper and it was the first time in years when I heard my stomach actually rumbling - I was so used to eating at the first sign of cravings that I forgot how it feels.
Ive almost never been eating breakfasts and when I went on delivery diet and started eating them then ive been feeling better tbh
Healthly food, calculated calories, good stuff in general.
When you are living alone then it is really good option because when I calculated my shopping costs then switching to it wasnt more expensive and im eating way better while saving time
Is that a cultural thing? We have pretty much zero food waste on any buffet as you can easily only take what you actually want to eat. It's just basic good education to be considerate with resources, especially food resources - and I rarely see people taking more than they actually eat, so it's not just an "our family" thing. If you do throw away a lot of foot on a buffet you're just an inconsiderate asshole - and if a restaurant location has significant food waste from that they should just start charging for leftovers.
That'd be just poor planning on part of the hotel/restaurant. It'd be a valid excuse when starting new, but after a few weeks that should be under control.
If you only do breakfast buffets it's a bit harder - but you monitor the situation, and as breakfast time approaches the end you reduce things you can't store or re-use otherwise. Pretty much any hotel I've been to in the last few years had that kind of items run out without restocking them when we had a late breakfast.
If you also do lunch/dinner buffets you have some more options, and can have some dishes reusing the leftovers. I've also seen that regularly - they had the planned dishes, and a few smaller pots with something they came up with to reuse whatever was left over.
The implied problem: People waste too much food at hotel breakfast buffets.
The work: Some people made a model (that itself is devoid of actual hotels, food, and people altogether, as well lacking validation) that let them wiggle some parameters and see if waste changed in that simulation.
The proposed solution: There isn't one. It's just dogshit.
We can learn roughly as much about how consumption and waste and profitability work in the real world by playing Roller Coaster Tycoon.
It's incredible how this stuff even made its way into the Obama administration.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjArvN9cfgE, or on Spotify or Apple podcasts
Just like making room service opt in - they can claim it's available but obviously a lot of people just don't bother because they pick up on the signal from the hotel that they don't want to do it
Personally I've never seen wasteful people at breakfast buffets in the UK. Greedy yes but not plates of unfinished food.
It's also good to remember how much breakfast regularly costs now. £15-20 is quite common at mid range places - £10 of yesteryear is exceedingly rare
Straight off the plane at Gatwick, I boarded a train into London, and ended up at the Gourmet Burger Kitchen, which was some kind of import from New Zealand and had some decent grub.
On the way home I had an overnight layover, and I stayed in a rather nice hotel in Westminster. The staff was Eastern European Slavs. I asked about places to eat, and it turned out that the entire street offered restaurants, so I grabbed some fish & chips and a ginger beer, and some fruit from a convenience store.
In the morning, the hotel offered a "continental breakfast" as we call it in the States, so it was complimentary and basically all-you-can-eat.
It featured delicious fare and was quite satisfying. There was melon and cereal and milk to drink and tea. I was happy with that and it was a a good send-off before the airport. I am very thankful for meals like that, which are included in the cost of the hotel room, because it definitely saves time and expenses from going to find a restaurant.
There exist hotels where breakfast is still very cheap (but the rooms are accordingly more expensive). The reason is that business travelers, the budgets for meals are really tight (you have to pay anything above by yourself), but the maximum allowed costs for hotel rooms are typically much less tight.
To accommodate such business travelers (though these are not the only guests), the hotel makes the breakfast really cheap, but the room accordingly more expensive (but still within the typical budget of business travelers), so that such customers can deduct more travel expenses to the employer.
Which is unfortunately more common