Decolonizing Diets: Eating Three-Meals-A-Day and Its Colonial Implications
The colonial roots of eating three meals a day and how it has shaped our health
By Mahek Nair
Every morning, you immediately head from your room to the kitchen, filling a bowl with cereal and milk. Once you finish eating breakfast, you pack a lunch which you’ll eat at exactly 1 PM. Upon arriving home from work, you hungrily prepare a dinner that you’ll consume at 7:00 PM.
Does this routine sound familiar? If you’re like most, you consume three meals at roughly the same times every day. Surprisingly, it hasn’t always been this way.
Colonialism is both an outstandingly obvious yet equally concealed super-structure which dictates so much of how our lives are lived. When, and what, we eat often seems to revolve around the ways humans have adapted to the white supremacy mindset. What are the health implications of this routine and what current efforts exist to dismantle such systems?
When European colonizers first came to Northern America, they found that their dieting habits differed greatly from those of the Indigenous peoples. Native North Americans would eat when they were hungry intuitively, and through a more traditional Hunter-Gatherer diet. This would require food to be eaten when the opportunity arose due to the relative scarcity of sources (2). Through orientalist and primitive perceptions, colonizers believed “civilized people ate properly and boundaried their eating, thus differentiating themselves from the animal kingdom, where grazing is the norm” (2). In the process of industrialization, they began to impose the three meals-a-day system in an attempt to domesticate Indigenous communities.
According to the renowned writer Kiera Butler, strict adherence to such mealtimes is “anti-science, racist and might actually be making you sick” (2). Indeed, researchers have observed biological resistance to food colonization within the transition to mass agricultural practices and its colonial impositions.
Mass agricultural practices and the transition towards a wheat-based diet came alongside urbanization in the 19th century. This transition marketed the increased availability of food to sustain the promotion of a three-meal system consisting of primarily carbohydrates (3).
Recent research has observed a worsening of blood lipids associated with a “gorging” diet (a reduced meal frequency, one or two meals daily) compared to “nibbling” (the consumption of frequent smaller meals or snacks). In these studies, authors stated that a reduced meal frequency is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and higher insulin concentrations as a result of an increased level of cholesterol synthesis (3). The association was also confirmed after adjusting for alcohol, smoking, systolic blood pressure, and macronutrient intake (3).
Since a person's eating habits are one of the greatest determinants of health, dieticians often suggest adding two snacks (morning and afternoon) to help appetite control, and to avoid going without food for more than three to four hours. Indeed, mainstream media messaging is turning away from the three-meals-a-day system to eating “five to six times a day” in moderation (3).
The implications of the historical origins of control over food are extremely evident when looking at the health statistics of Indigenous Canadians today. National Data from Statistics Canada reported 60% of Indigenous families are food insecure, more than seven times the national average rate (1). In addition, obesity and diabetes rates are soaring. Estimates suggest 82% of all Indigenous adults are overweight or obese, while one-fifth have diabetes (1).
Truth and reconciliation recommendations include calls to action for increased access to traditional foods through a combination of subsidies to support growing, harvesting and food preservation (1). They are also calling for food prices in rural areas to be reduced by increasing community eligibility for subsidy programs, such as the Nutrition North Canada program (1). Government programs that include Indigenous peoples at the forefront of the distribution systems, along with further funding to help ramp up food production, are necessary measures to effectively decolonize global health.
References
Bodirsky, M., & Johnson, J. (2008). Decolonizing diet: Healing by reclaiming traditional indigenous foodways. Research Papers, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.7202/019373ar
Carroll, A. (2013). Three squares the invention of the American meal. Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
Paoli, A., Tinsley, G., Bianco, A., & Moro, T. (2019). The influence of meal frequency and timing on health in humans: The role of fasting. Nutrients, 11(4), 719. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11040719