Understanding the “Breakfast Culture Clash” and “Bedtime Clash” Between English-Speaking Countries and Others - Part ONE, in a TWO-Part Series

Typical breakfast here. Photo from: http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/00/1e/09/a7/the-simple-italian-breakfast.jpg

This is the first in a series of two posts. Today I will explore the background breakfast facts.

I realized that English/American/Australian/Western society has a fundamental culture clash with Middle Eastern society (at least in my particular host country). I am married to a man of the local culture, and we have been married for 16 years. A couple weeks ago, I was packing my lunch for school, and making my breakfast, when he made a strange comment to me. He said, “You shouldn’t be eating breakfast! You should just be having a cup of coffee, like everybody else!”

Suddenly, a “light bulb” went on in my head–I suddenly understood the root of the problem our school has been having for years and years with the local culture. Ever since our school opened a few years back, we who are foreign teachers could never understand the societal resistance we encountered to having students eat breakfast before coming to school. Two-thirds of our upper-middle-class students show up at school without any breakfast! Teachers view it as the students are waiting up to two hours for “snack time” in order to substitute their snack for the breakfast they have “missed.” We can’t understand why the parents aren’t feeding their children before school. Now I think I see what is happening.

This culture has different habitual times of eating than the English-language cultures. It appears that many people get up, and have only coffee (if they are getting up early). My husband claims that everyone feels that offices and schools should break at 10:00 (not for a snack, but for people to have breakfast at that time). Nearly all the host-country native workers at our school have told me, when I asked them why they couldn’t eat their breakfast before coming to school, “If I eat early, I feel like vomiting.” I thought they were just making this up. Later, when I questioned the children in my class about if they had breakfast, what they ate, and at what time, they also gave the same response, “If I eat early, I feel like vomiting.” So I think this is a cultural idea which is transmitted to the children.

After taking a late breakfast, they feel the correct time to eat lunch is any time between 1 PM and 3 PM (depending on the individual and family). A lot of people have “coffee” and a snack around 6 PM, with dinner commonly at 10 - 11 PM! No wonder we can’t get school children to go to bed at 8 or 9 PM! They haven’t even had their dinner yet. When they are eating dinner very late, no wonder they aren’t hungry to eat breakfast early.

Compare that with a typical (Western) American schedule. Get up at 6 AM, eat breakfast at 6:30 AM, and on the way to school/work by 7 AM. Lunch around 11:30-12:00-1:00 (for the really late people). Early people eat dinner at 5 PM, my family always ate at 6 PM, and late people have their dinner at 7 PM. Kids have bath and are in bed by 8 - 9 PM, at the latest, in order to get up at 6 AM. Northeastern America works on a slightly later schedule (probably advanced by an hour), and I hear Britain works on a later schedule, too. But it appears that the non-English speaking countries work on a FAR, FAR LATER SCHEDULE for everything.

The next post will explore ideas the foreign teachers have had/tried to “force” students and families to have breakfast before school, and the societal resistance and explanations we’ve encountered.

Eileen

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