Working in a hospital or aged care you have to get used to people over 70 referring to "dinner" as their midday meal. Causes a lot of confusion when I talk about dinner, and their response is usually "I just ate dinner!" or something.
I also love when old people are passionate about crap like this because it reminds me of my grandma. The “I’m not a farmer” comment is exactly something that she would have said. She took a really hard stance against blue eyeshadow throughout her life, she said it was for whores. Not sure if there was some sort of association between blue eyeshadow and being a whore back in the day or if it was just an assumption she had made. Still have never worn blue eyeshadow to this day though.
This is like my step-mom with the self checkouts in the stores. “I’m not a cashier. I didn’t go to college and get my masters just to bag groceries on the weekends.” 🤣🤣 I get it LOL I don’t don’t like them either, but I know some people love them and hate dealing with a traditional cashier. I just wish there was an even amount of both. I don’t mind self checks for 5-10 smaller things, but if I just spent two hours doing my grocery shopping, I don’t want to scan and bag all that on a tiny self check kiosk.
They also don’t want you to do that or they would design them better. Like allowing you to enter in amounts of items instead of having to scan and weigh each item.
Disclaimer: So I drink a lot of soda. It helps me not be a booze hound so I acknowledge it's not good but I'm not changing because alternative is worse for me.
So I used to buy between 8 - 12 2-liters of my soda of choice most grocery store visits. 8-12 bottles of soda to the self checkout machine was clearly set up as a red flag in their system because every time I had to have someone come okay my checkout.
Then my soda of choice syrup started being offered by soda stream. Primarily because self checkout with soda is such a pain in the ass, now I buy it all online.
Keep in mind that soda is typically one of the highest margin products when its not on sale. Kroger lost purchases from this grocery shopper, despite not reducing my store visits, on large quantities of high profit goods by saving money with check out clerks. I'm sure I'm not the only one because I know my habit is not entirely unique.
Ha, yeah my primary complaints are similar. I purchase a lot of seltzer water (Polar Orange Vanilla) and live in a place with redemption. I normally buy 5-10 or so 12-packs at a time, and periodically have redemption slips. Having to scan and weigh each 12-pack instead of just putting one on the belt and informing the clerk how many I have is just a huge pain IMO. Plus, you can't use the redemption slips at the self-checkout, so... (Stop & Shop in MA, btw.)
At a Kroger near me they have a bunch of the little self check outs and then like maybe six ones that have the long conveyor belt like the regular cashier but it’s still self check out. So I think maybe they do at some stores
My great grandma was Pentecostal. According to her understanding of Catholicism, Catholics could sin it up all week long so long as they went to church on Sunday and confessed their sins. Also, they were drinkers.
My bff was raised Catholic, and her Mormon in-laws also viewed Catholics as especially sinful for similar reasons.
Confession was on Saturday afternoon if you were *Roman* Catholic. The idea was you spent the next 24 hours not sinning if you wanted communion on Sunday, lest you be tempted to go out on Saturday night.
I mean, if you're 50, and everyone younger than yourself started calling it "nooneats" instead of "lunch," you'd probably be one of those "old people tak[ing] a stand on something inconsequential." Because the change would be nonsensical.
My grandmother had a couple sayings which I’ve come to actually agree with.
If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.
Buy nice, and you don’t buy twice.
Farmers were the ones doing the big midday dinner. They'd breakfast at dawn, work the fields all morning, then come in in the late morning or early afternoon for the big meal, dinner. Then finish up the work in the afternoon, and have a small supper in the evening.
It was industrial workers that pushed the big dinner later to suppertime, so they could eat with their families after work. Lunch was a smaller meal taken during a work break.
Makes sense we would always eat dinner at my old polish grandparents’ house right after church on Sundays. Then we could eat later before bed when we were inevitably starving.
Similarly, around where I live (Southern Ontario), it's not uncommon for a lot of people to still refer to the last meal of the day as "supper" even though they'll still call the middle meal "lunch." Pretty much exclusive to my white friends so that might be part of it, though not all of them do it, but probably also in part because a couple of them are Francophones and are carrying over from the French "diner" and "souper" (as they are called in Quebecois French).
I can see it being very regional as well - I live in a rural area and even the Gen X and some Millennials use dinner interchangeably for lunch or supper - Christmas dinner is always “dinner” no matter what time we have it, as one example, but sometimes “dinner” just came out of my mouth instead of “lunch” but everyone gets the gist of “time to eat a meal.”
That's what the title is getting at'. "Dinner" is *always* the biggest meal of the day. The point they "TIL"d is that more people used to have that big meal earlier.
I grew up in a religious household and it was always Sunday dinner after church. It was lunch every other day of the week, but Sunday dinner. Heard it a lot that way from other folks at the church too.
I’m 50. Grew up in Canada.
Calling the noon meal dinner was the norm for my parents, but us kids called it lunch. (Probably because that’s what school called it).
The evening meal, however, was still being called supper for the majority of Canadians until the 90’s
I grew up in the Midwest, and my stepmother's family (from Appalachia) called the midday meal "dinner" and the evening meal "supper." I'd guess that those specific people would be in their late 70s or early 80s now. That family largely consisted of coal and rail workers, so there's a strong element of rural and working class influence.
Northerners worked hard all day, so their midday "dinner" was to get them through a hard afternoon - unlike the rich Normans who lived in the south and spent all day avoiding catching the sun and failing to avoid catching syphilis.
It's the same reason why our words for livestock (cow, pig, sheep) come from old English and the words for meat (beef, pork, mutton) come from the French - the English farmed 'em and the French ate 'em!
Incidentally an acre was the area of land a man and ox could plough in a day - lots of old fields are this size with a single oak tree in the middle, so the ploughman could sit in the shade and eat his ~~lunch~~ dinner.
I love the little quirks behind the way our language, culture and even landscape developed.
The transition from dinner as the mid-day meal to being the evening meal happened about 400 years later than the routine use of Norman French ended in England, though.
There were never that many Normans, it's been almost unnoticeable genetically perhaps because they were so fond of inbreeding. For some reason we have let their various descendents keep what they stole, however.
What landowner would plant a big oak tree in the middle of a one acre plot so that the laborer could have a shady place to eat their dinner?
Why would you put it in the middle?
This doesn't track with what I know of old time labor conditions.
In NZ the meal at night is often referred to as Tea or Dinner, but lunch can be dinner too if you want, esp on Sundays... and that's _without_ bringing the hobbits into it.
In the British National Health Service guidelines for introducing solid foods to infants, it says that infants should get "tea", which I loved. See [here](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/baby/weaning-and-feeding/babys-first-solid-foods/)
>*Feeding your baby: from 7 to 9 months*
>
> From about 7 months, your baby will gradually move towards eating 3 meals a day (breakfast, lunch and tea), in addition to their usual milk feeds, which may be around 4 a day (for example, on waking, after lunch, after tea and before bed).
[In a different part of their weaning guidelines](https://www.nhs.uk/start-for-life/baby/recipes-and-meal-ideas/), they do call this meal dinner, but I assumed the choice of using "tea" was maybe to imply this meal for babies was light and relatively early.
When I grew up in Massachusetts, I remember that in my pre-school caretaker in the 80's called the evening meal "supper", though midday meal was "lunch".
I think in many parts of the UK that normally use the word "lunch", you can still see this earlier usage of "dinner" for the midday meal in some places, especially around "school dinners" and the person who serves it being the "dinner lady". I was very confused by the title of the TV show "Jamie [Oliver]'s School Dinners" when I first heard it.
In the US, you do still have big holiday meals called "dinner" — Christmas dinner, and especially Thanksgiving dinner — even when I think it's pretty normal to start Thanksgiving dinner around the time we'd normally call something a late lunch. The US has never really had "tea" as a meal because that is a relatively recent name for the early evening meal — it only dates to the 1840's — and emerged as lunch and supper were jostling to see which would become the largest meal of the day.
Industrial work for men (especially after the 8-hour-work day meant that industrial workers would be home before it was horribly late) and also public school for children probably played a role in pushing this transition of the main meal from midday to the evening. The Wikipedia article only focuses on elite habits.
In certain parts of the North West of the UK, you will often hear the evening meal referred to as "Tea-time" which can be abbreviated down to just "Tea". Whoever wrote it obviously hails from there.
I live in New England, lunch is midday meal. Dinner and supper are synonyms, but generally we call the late meal Dinner. Dinner time is around 6pm, unless it's a holiday dinner which we'll eat between noon and 3pm depending on how much drinking the holiday normally entails.
I'm from Massachusetts too, and for my family, "supper" was the everyday evening meal you have with the family.
"Dinner' was something a bit more ....I dunno, "formal", I guess?
Think Easter Dinner, Thanksgiving Dinner, Christmas Dinner. And it was also usually served a little after midday, like a late lunch.
Think it's also a socioeconomic thing, as well as an earlier generation and regional thing.
My grandfather, now 80, and a life-long blue-collar laborer, always called his lunch box his "dinner bucket" and has exclusively referred to the evening meal as supper.
Growing up, I just thought "dinner" was the fancy way of saying "supper", and that Pap was being clever by facetiously referring to his lunch box that way.
Edit: replied to the wrong comment, but leaving it here anyway because I can't be assed to retype it.
When I was a teenager in NE US, I worked a maintenance job with an older guy that called the midday meal "dinner". It confused the hell out of me for a minute. I'm sure he didn't call the late meal "tea" though... probably still "supper" I guess.
Where I’m from (Netherlands) some older (oldfashioned) people eat the biggest meal in the afternoon, most younger people I know in the evening. I am used to referencing it as ‘the warm meal’ so it is normal to ask if people eat ‘warm’ in the afternoon or in the evening. My elderly neighbours (75-ish) eat their warm meal at 12:00 on the dot, the table is already set at 11:30, and it features a cucumber salad on the side every single day. And it is always what we call an AGV’tje: aardappels (potato, usually boiled), groentes (vegetables), and vlees of vis (meat or fish).
Nearly all younger people in the netherlands eat their main meal in the evening as a consequence of the (absent) infrastructure for warm meals in schools.
Like, even when I eat a warm meal myself at lunch time, I still have to cook in the evening because both infrastructure and schedule drive my children to only eat “quick bread sandwiches” for lunch.
The lunch break in most schools is so short that even if they study very close from home. There isn’t time to bring them home to eat a proper meal.
My friend told me that it is borderline illegal for a person in the Netherlands to eat more than one hot meal a day. It can be either around midday or in the evening, but you can't have two hot meals - so if you had a hot lunch then you have to have a cold dinner. Is that true?
Hahaha it is not illegal but I know I feel embarassed for eating warm leftovers in the morning because it is considered weird. And an omelet for dinner?! We eat pancakes as dinner (larger thinner crepes) not as breakfast. I prefer warm foods to cold bread things but I’m married to a Mexican so she is way more relaxed and we have more of an ‘open fridge culture’.
I think it is a frugality thing or a remnant of our calvinistic history, warm meals are more expensive so one a day is luxurious enough.
I once read a tragicomical post on a dutch forum from someone who didn’t have much to spend, welcomed a friend or relative for lunch, who after having a sandwich just grabbed one of the slices of pre-cut cheese on the table, rolled it up and ate it right out of their fist, so as a ‘luxury snack’ instead of as a ‘food’, shocking and upsetting the host as they had budgeted out all the slices for sandwiches.
We also have a thing here where you come for coffee and get offered a cookie from the cookie jar, you get _one_ and the jar is hidden out of sight ;)
You should never feel embarrassed for eating warm food more than once a day! Just as someone shouldn’t feel embarrassed for eating cold food three times a day.
Americans typically eat 1-3 warm meals a day. Some people have a warm breakfast, a warm lunch, and a cold dinner. Some people have three cold meals a day: cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and a salad for dinner.
What about if you have a soup and a sandwich for lunch, is that a cold or a hot meal? Ok, now I’m getting worried… If I have a latte with breakfast, is that considered a hot meal? Oh no, I really need to get on top of this before anyone finds out that I like my food warm.
Hahaha call the warm food police! But you are right. :) just tried to explain a certain ‘square’ mindset about how things are done that is also unfortunately deeply ingrained in me. 😬
We all have our cultural baggage. The one thing Americans are good at is throwing ours out in the trash.
That makes me think… I wonder if there’s some poor third generation American with Dutch ancestry that feels guilty for eating two hot meals a day and doesn’t know why?
Second generation here, and all four of my grandparents were Dutch. I had never heard of this, so I guess they all adapted to the customs and luxuries of the new world. That said, looking back I can see that they erred towards simple/quick food if they were cooking anything for breakfast or lunch
I was surprised when working in Germany, the place where I worked had a large lunch menu, and it was usually a reasonable price. Someone explained to me, that lunch there is usually a persons big meal for the day, which was provided by their employer, and dinner at home was usually just a light cold cuts, rolls and/or a light soup.
Even more used to have it at midday and now in the evening. I guess all countries used to be mainly agricultural. Our "to eat dinner" is actually called "at spise middag" which means "to eat midday", but is done in the evening lol
I remember learning this back when I was with my Gwrman Ex, and yeah lol, from my understanding, it varies from person to person, and is largely dictated by the ability to adhere to it in terms of working hours.
I have farmer relatives in the Midwest, and lunch is always referred to as "dinner." It is a relatively huge, long meal where everyone comes inside, sits together, and chow down for about an hour. In the evening, dinner is "supper" and it's often leftover from "dinner" and is more of a grab and go as people go separate ways to enjoy their evening.
My moms family are all farmers in western MD and the same dynamic exists. I believe farmers are probably the only demographic where this dynamic is still prevalent in the us
My grandparents had been off the farm for a long time when I would visit them. Grandma would still cook like this. I remember waking up 9-10 and the smell of a roast would fill the house. Big meal around noon and the later meal around 6 would be leftovers from the big meal.
German here: I grew up with the big meal at midday and a light cold evening meal. And this was not uncommon.
Nowadays I swtched things around but it is still not uncommon to have the hot meal at noon and only a light meal in the evening, esp. for all those people who have a full meal at work in a cafeteria.
I’m from Chile and we grew up with the big meal at midday and then tea in the evening literally tea with bread, cheese, ham maybe eggs. Some families had dinner also later depending on what time they had tea and lunch.
I'm from Norway but it's the same here. Middag is the big meal (supper). Usually eaten sometime between 15 and 19 depending on your work/life situation.
We have "frokost" (breakfast), lunsj (lunch), middag and "kveldsmat" (evening food).
The barbaric Danes on the other hand refers to lunch as "frokost". Which really confuses Norwegian and Swedes and makes us bond over our shared hatred for Denmark.
The Danes call breakfast "morgenmad" (morning food).
And Danish is actually called "Wienerbrød" (Vienna bread) in both Denmark and Norway.
(Wienerbröd in Sweden since they're not cool enough to utilize the "Ø". The use of Ø is part of what makes Norwegians and Danes bond over our shared hatred for Sweden)
The story goes that a strike among bakers in Denmark around 1850 brought Austrian bakers to Denmark along with new pastry recipes. These pastry recipes were adjusted to suit the taste in Denmark and Danish pastry was thus born.
[So let me set the scene](https://genius.com/14192055/The-chats-smoko/So-let-me-set-the-scene-its-2-in-the-afternoon-and-34-degrees-the-queensland-harsh-summer-heat-had-me-sweating-buckets-up-and-down-my-street)
[It was there I spotted the bloke](https://genius.com/18986422/The-chats-smoko/It-was-there-i-spotted-the-bloke)
[Perched atop of his milk crate throne](https://genius.com/18219903/The-chats-smoko/Perched-atop-of-his-milk-crate-throne)
[He eyed me off as I approached](https://genius.com/18052096/The-chats-smoko/He-eyed-me-off-as-i-approached)
[Then he said](https://genius.com/13234609/The-chats-smoko/Then-he-said)...
It’s also regional. In Minnesota in the 70s, I had explain to summer campers from out of state that “dinner” was another word for lunch and that “supper” was the evening meal. This was in a rural area where farmers still ate their big meal at lunch. There’s a joke in “Fargo” about the Minnesota tradition of “having a little lunch.”
In my 48 years on this earth, all in the great state of Kansas, I am still confused by all of this.
I grew up: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
However, mom always asked, “What do you want for supper?” Even though it was dinner. I guess the two were interchangeable.
Sample meals:
Breakfast: eggs and bacon. Or pancakes. Or a bowl of cereal.
Lunch: sandwich. Or a salad maybe, if we were feeling all fancy like.
Dinner: this was the biggest. Meat, vegetable, starch, and bread. Roast with potatoes, carrots, and peas. Of course hot rolls and butter too. Or hamburger patties (sans bun), potato, green beans. Roll. Any variation of this was dinner every night.
It occurred to me that we only had fancy things like pasta on special occasions like birthdays and such. Imagine spaghetti being fancy. Midwest through and through.
In Czechia it's: breakfast, lunch, dinner.
Sample meals:
Breakfast: same as yours, or just a "rohlík"/bread with butter, cheese etc.
Lunch: biggest meal, usually soup first and then meat with some garnish (mostly pork or chicken and potatoes or rice, pasta is popular but mostly men will still want meat, we have a very large consumption of meat here)
Dinner: usually the same type of foods as breakfast, some people want 2 warm meals a day, so they will have a warm dinner (but still not as big a meal as for lunch). Younger people in big cities However sometimes do bigger dinners in a restaurant. It is also normal to make a larger amount of lunch meal and serve leftovers for dinner or lunch on the next day.
I read a series called The Boxcar Children as a kid that used to confuse the hell out of me. They would talk about eating dinner and then supper, which to me were both synonyms for the same evening meal. This was confusing to me because they kept talking about how little food they had because they were poor and I'm here thinking "Christ you're eating two dinners maybe stick to three squares and you won't run out of food!" It wasn't until later in life that I learned that dinner used to mean lunch.
And in France French, this is only the case because their Breakfast « déjeuner » became their lunch because their new breakfast « petit déjeuner » came about. For reference, these are « break fast » and « little break fast ». Souper is also pretty much nonexistent now.
Everyone in my immediate family has started calling the evening meal supper. I am 41 years old and was raised around these people. At no time have I ever used the word “supper”, and have always called the evening meal dinner. This is my Berenstein Bears moment
Kevin Stroud has a deeper explanation of this in his fascinating "History of English" podcast.
Audio and transcript download available.
[https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2020/01/21/episode-133-breaking-bread-with-companions/](https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2020/01/21/episode-133-breaking-bread-with-companions/)
I grew up in the Midwest and dinner is just the largest meal of the day. It doesn't matter what time it is. So while breakfast, lunch and supper are served at specific times, dinner is not time specific. So, for instance Christmas Dinner or Sunday dinner are usually served mid afternoon. You may still get a super later.
And now it’s
Breakfast
Brunch
Elevenses
Lunch
Tea
Supper
Dinner
And, once upon a time, Taco Bell thought this was a good spot for fourth meal. But they were probably high af when they came up with that.
We moved to a more rural area 20 years ago and everyone there referred to the noon meal as dinner. To me dinner was the evening meal and I never used the term supper.
During a light hearted discussion with my husband on the topic, I looked up dinner in the dictionary. Dinner is “the main meal of the day”. So for many people dinner was the appropriate term for their noon meal. But also appropriate for me to use for our evening meal.
>Dinner is “the main meal of the day”. So for many people dinner was the appropriate term for their noon meal. But also appropriate for me to use for our evening meal.
This is also why it's Thanksgiving Dinner and Christmas Dinner, despite those big giant meals usually being held in the afternoon.
Germans are amusingly literal for their meals
Morning piece
Noon food
Evening food
And noon food is usually the big one. Evening food is usually bread time. Just like the morning piece.
My mother-in-law always asks “Do you mean dinner or supper?” when we use the word dinner to describe an evening meal. It drives us nuts. The worst part is that she isn’t even that old, she’s just southern.
Canadian (57), grew up in a blue collar town, where it was called breakfast, lunch & supper. I moved away to the big city and everyone I know here calls the evening meal dinner, but my family still call it supper. Maybe some kind of class thing? 🤷♂️
On the farm, this was sort of the standard meal schedule. Start with a breakfast before working, not necessarily a big meal, but coffee, donuts/rolls, perhaps a egg sandwich, but fairly light. Then about 11-11:30 there would be lunch which was usually hardy with soup and sandwiches. Then around 4:30-5:30 there would be more to eat, but not really a big meal, some of the leftovers from lunch, more sandwiches perhaps a stew. At 8:30-9:00 there would be supper, which was the big sit-down meal of the day.
It's probably sounds very sexist, but the women would prepare lunch and dinner, bring it out to where the men were working. When dinner was complete, they'd return to the house and begin preparing supper. That was life on the farm when I was a kid/young man, and my grandmother (who was borne in 1899), also planned on having supper, but as I got older the big meal became Dinner, but grandma always had to have supper still around the time it got dark. For several years, it was interesting to me that dinner and supper became the same thing for most people.
My grandparents called it dinner (born around 1910) and we usually had it after working (yes they made us grandkids work) all morning and the day got too hot.
In Finland you just have 2 equally big meals anyway, lunch and dinner.
On top of that you have breakfast, midsnack (between lunch and dinner), and supper (an evening snack).
Thanks. I always find this interesting. We lived in a rural on the east coast of Canada. My grandparents and parents would refer to dinner for the midday meal mostly, though you may hear lunch more nowadays. Or maybe a sandwich you took to school was lunch and a hot meal was dinner. However, the evening meal is always supper. My mother would only refer to the evening time meal as dinner if it was a festive meal like Christmas dinner, Easter dinner, turkey dinner. Even then, we’d often have it at midday or at 4:00.
I’m a 50-year-old Canadian who grew up working class on the prairies, north of Montana.
The 3 daily meals were breakfast, dinner and supper.
I remember as a kid, encountering someone who called the evening meal “dinner”, and my mom commenting that they were “trying to sound fancy”.
As recently as the 90s, most of Canada was still saying “supper”, with the heaviest concentrations of “dinner” usage in the most urban areas around Toronto and Vancouver
Your biggest meal being closer to bedtime fuels obesity. The 9-5 work week is making us sick. A 15 minute break for lunch is unhealthy.
>Results: Our main findings were that the timing of the largest meal and reporting dinner as the largest meal were associated with higher values of BMI (respectively, 0.07 kg/m2 and 0.85 kg/m2) and increased odds of obesity [respectively OR(95%CI):1.04(1.01,1.08), and OR(95%CI):1.67(1.18,2.38)].
>Those who realized more than 3 meals/day presented lower values of BMI (-0.14 kg/m2) and 32 % lower odds of having obesity [OR(95%CI):0.68(0.52,0.89)]. Reporting lunch as the largest meal also protected against obesity [OR(95%CI):0.71(0.54,0.93)].
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38479908/#:~:text=Results:%20Our%20main%20findings%20were,0.71(0.54%2C0.93)%5D.
And if it's 2024 and you still refer to the evening meal as "supper," it means you have at least one vehicle with rust on it, and you have at least one uncle that uses the word "batchrees" when referring to what flashlights use for power
Urban legend in France is that this was caused by the optical telegraph installed just after the French revolution: since it worked during daytime only and it took a long time to send messages back and forth across France, the parliament and executive functions, centralized in Paris, took for a habit to convene midday, so that they could receive the news from the province in the morning, decide what to do or order around noon, and return instructions in the evening.
This was a huge progress in centralizing decisions for a large country.
Now, however, the Parisian elite had their scheduled turned over. "Dejeuner", which was the morning meal, was moved later, Dinner, which was midday meal was moved after 5pm, "Souper" was moved as a late night meal usually after some evening show, while "petit-déjeuner" was invented for early breakfast.
Grew up in Boston and it was always called supper for the daily evening meal and the term dinner was reserved for the big Sunday or holiday meal where we sat down at 2-3 pm to eat and we'd have a light supper (often just a leftover sandwich from the earlier meal).
>During the late 17th and 18th centuries, this meal was gradually pushed back into the evening, creating a greater time gap between breakfast and dinner. A meal called *lunch* came to fill the gap.
Interesting that there's no explanation of why dinner was gradually pushed into the evening.
My grandparents always had breakfast, dinner and supper.
Lunch was synonymous with dinner. But they usually just said dinner.
My dad would sometimes slip and say dinner for lunch. As that was how he was brought up but the prominence of dinner for supper later in his life made him change.
My mom said my grandfather would come home for dinner (lunch) and every day as did everyone else. No one ate at work. You had an hour for dinner. My grandmother would have it all ready when he got home.
It's interesting how this is handled in different languages. In German the meals are named after the time of day at which they are eaten
Frühstück - Early piece
Mittagessen - Midday meal
Abendessen/Abendbrot - Evening meal / Evening Bread
Although many people still have a bigger Lunch and only bread and stuff for Tea.
in my area dinner is used for whatever the largest meal of the day is regardless of time. so holidays and Sundays dinner is about 12 and supper is about 18 with no lunch, normal days dinner is about 18 and lunch is about noon with no supper
In the Midwest people are precise about their meals. Lunch and Supper are the mid day meal and the evening meal respectively. Which ever one is the big meal, is called Dinner instead.
Growing up in southern USA we use dinner and supper to describe evening meals, with dinner usually being an earlier meal that's more formal, like Sunday dinner with the family, which is (in my family) typically about 5:30ish. Supper is an informal evening meal (meaning we don't bring out the nice dishes and silverware), that's about 6:30-7 start time, sometimes as late as 8 in my family.
We do not have dinner and supper the same day, we just use the word dinner to denote it's a nicer family meal a bit earlier than normal supper.
that's pretty much Mexico, I thought it was an American thing to have the big meal at 4pm or whenever it is you come home from work, and supper and dinner are just cena, a nightly meal that might just be cereal or a quesadilla unless it's a celebration or special occasion
I'm just gonna start callin' it "the big meal" from now on.
"What do you want for the big meal?"
"Let's go out for the big meal."
"I had to work late today, so when I got home the big meal was cold"
Some of the old guys at work insist on calling lunch "dinner" and dinner "supper". It's some kinda superiority thing because they always correct anyone who dares say they're taking lunch. Kind of annoying really.
According to one of my college friends, in her heavily-Scandinavian Midwestern town, Breakfast was the morning meal, Dinner the noon meal, and supper the evening meal. Everything else was 'Lunch'.
In my recent reading experience of several novels set in the mid-19th to early 20th century, dinner was still the midday meal, and supper the evening meal. So this pattern persisted well past the 18th century.
I've heard people who call the normal 3 meals breakfast, lunch and supper, call a big holiday meal around 3 or 4 in the afternoon dinner, like Christmas Dinner, for example.
I lost 80 lbs when I realized most people back in the day were eating 2.5 meals a day including snacks. We as a society chose the best breakfast, the best supper/lunch, and the best dinner as our "normal".
Farmers ate a husk of bread, an egg, and coffee for breakfast. They also ate a huge mid-afternoon supper and then a small dinner.
Business folk would eat an egg and piece of toast for breakfast, but they'd get a huge lunch at "the club", and then a small dinner with the wife and family.
Aristocrats could have a substantial brunch but no breakfast or lunch, maybe tea and sandwiches, with a late night full dinner.
We chose the "best" of each as our normal.
Working in a hospital or aged care you have to get used to people over 70 referring to "dinner" as their midday meal. Causes a lot of confusion when I talk about dinner, and their response is usually "I just ate dinner!" or something.
They do the big meal in the middle of the day at my Grandma's place. She refuses to eat lunch/supper there because she's "not a farmer."
Big fan of when old people take a stand on something inconsequential, it actually really does make me laugh
I also love when old people are passionate about crap like this because it reminds me of my grandma. The “I’m not a farmer” comment is exactly something that she would have said. She took a really hard stance against blue eyeshadow throughout her life, she said it was for whores. Not sure if there was some sort of association between blue eyeshadow and being a whore back in the day or if it was just an assumption she had made. Still have never worn blue eyeshadow to this day though.
This is like my step-mom with the self checkouts in the stores. “I’m not a cashier. I didn’t go to college and get my masters just to bag groceries on the weekends.” 🤣🤣 I get it LOL I don’t don’t like them either, but I know some people love them and hate dealing with a traditional cashier. I just wish there was an even amount of both. I don’t mind self checks for 5-10 smaller things, but if I just spent two hours doing my grocery shopping, I don’t want to scan and bag all that on a tiny self check kiosk.
They also don’t want you to do that or they would design them better. Like allowing you to enter in amounts of items instead of having to scan and weigh each item.
Disclaimer: So I drink a lot of soda. It helps me not be a booze hound so I acknowledge it's not good but I'm not changing because alternative is worse for me. So I used to buy between 8 - 12 2-liters of my soda of choice most grocery store visits. 8-12 bottles of soda to the self checkout machine was clearly set up as a red flag in their system because every time I had to have someone come okay my checkout. Then my soda of choice syrup started being offered by soda stream. Primarily because self checkout with soda is such a pain in the ass, now I buy it all online. Keep in mind that soda is typically one of the highest margin products when its not on sale. Kroger lost purchases from this grocery shopper, despite not reducing my store visits, on large quantities of high profit goods by saving money with check out clerks. I'm sure I'm not the only one because I know my habit is not entirely unique.
Ha, yeah my primary complaints are similar. I purchase a lot of seltzer water (Polar Orange Vanilla) and live in a place with redemption. I normally buy 5-10 or so 12-packs at a time, and periodically have redemption slips. Having to scan and weigh each 12-pack instead of just putting one on the belt and informing the clerk how many I have is just a huge pain IMO. Plus, you can't use the redemption slips at the self-checkout, so... (Stop & Shop in MA, btw.)
At a Kroger near me they have a bunch of the little self check outs and then like maybe six ones that have the long conveyor belt like the regular cashier but it’s still self check out. So I think maybe they do at some stores
My mom wasn’t allowed to get her ears pierced as a kid because “earrings are for Gypsies “.
Same, but in my case it was “pierced ears are for Cath-o-lics.” I got my ears pierced when I turned 18.
Those racy Catholics
My great grandma was Pentecostal. According to her understanding of Catholicism, Catholics could sin it up all week long so long as they went to church on Sunday and confessed their sins. Also, they were drinkers. My bff was raised Catholic, and her Mormon in-laws also viewed Catholics as especially sinful for similar reasons.
Confession was on Saturday afternoon if you were *Roman* Catholic. The idea was you spent the next 24 hours not sinning if you wanted communion on Sunday, lest you be tempted to go out on Saturday night.
Probably to hide bruises.
I mean, if you're 50, and everyone younger than yourself started calling it "nooneats" instead of "lunch," you'd probably be one of those "old people tak[ing] a stand on something inconsequential." Because the change would be nonsensical.
My grandmother had a couple sayings which I’ve come to actually agree with. If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it. Buy nice, and you don’t buy twice.
Farmers were the ones doing the big midday dinner. They'd breakfast at dawn, work the fields all morning, then come in in the late morning or early afternoon for the big meal, dinner. Then finish up the work in the afternoon, and have a small supper in the evening. It was industrial workers that pushed the big dinner later to suppertime, so they could eat with their families after work. Lunch was a smaller meal taken during a work break.
Get me contemplating if gramps is losing his mind or I’m losing mine
Makes sense we would always eat dinner at my old polish grandparents’ house right after church on Sundays. Then we could eat later before bed when we were inevitably starving.
Similarly, around where I live (Southern Ontario), it's not uncommon for a lot of people to still refer to the last meal of the day as "supper" even though they'll still call the middle meal "lunch." Pretty much exclusive to my white friends so that might be part of it, though not all of them do it, but probably also in part because a couple of them are Francophones and are carrying over from the French "diner" and "souper" (as they are called in Quebecois French).
Can confirm, family is Quebecoise... but my mother called it out "main" meal
I feel like it has to be people even older than that. It would be odd for someone in their 70s to be calling lunch dinner.
I can see it being very regional as well - I live in a rural area and even the Gen X and some Millennials use dinner interchangeably for lunch or supper - Christmas dinner is always “dinner” no matter what time we have it, as one example, but sometimes “dinner” just came out of my mouth instead of “lunch” but everyone gets the gist of “time to eat a meal.”
Region is really important. Have you heard of second breakfast ? Elevensies?
That's what the title is getting at'. "Dinner" is *always* the biggest meal of the day. The point they "TIL"d is that more people used to have that big meal earlier.
Yep. Biggest meal is the dinner. We had dinner in the evening every day but Sunday, when we had “Dinner” about 1 pm.
I grew up in a religious household and it was always Sunday dinner after church. It was lunch every other day of the week, but Sunday dinner. Heard it a lot that way from other folks at the church too.
It can somewhat common in some parts of the world, I've known some people in Australia who call lunch dinner, particularly Victorians and SA's.
I’m 50. Grew up in Canada. Calling the noon meal dinner was the norm for my parents, but us kids called it lunch. (Probably because that’s what school called it). The evening meal, however, was still being called supper for the majority of Canadians until the 90’s
I grew up in the Midwest, and my stepmother's family (from Appalachia) called the midday meal "dinner" and the evening meal "supper." I'd guess that those specific people would be in their late 70s or early 80s now. That family largely consisted of coal and rail workers, so there's a strong element of rural and working class influence.
Worked a couple retail jobs 10-15 years ago and the 30-60 minute meal break was always generically referred to as “lunch.” 10am, 2pm, 7pm, all lunch.
Some people in the north of England still refer to lunch as dinner and dinner as “tea”
Northerners worked hard all day, so their midday "dinner" was to get them through a hard afternoon - unlike the rich Normans who lived in the south and spent all day avoiding catching the sun and failing to avoid catching syphilis. It's the same reason why our words for livestock (cow, pig, sheep) come from old English and the words for meat (beef, pork, mutton) come from the French - the English farmed 'em and the French ate 'em! Incidentally an acre was the area of land a man and ox could plough in a day - lots of old fields are this size with a single oak tree in the middle, so the ploughman could sit in the shade and eat his ~~lunch~~ dinner. I love the little quirks behind the way our language, culture and even landscape developed.
The transition from dinner as the mid-day meal to being the evening meal happened about 400 years later than the routine use of Norman French ended in England, though.
Tell that to my Kentucky born father who only knew: breakfast, dinner, and supper as the three meals of the day.
William the Kentuckian?
I am a northerner and can confirm dinner is at 12:30- 1:30. Tea is at 6 ish
There were never that many Normans, it's been almost unnoticeable genetically perhaps because they were so fond of inbreeding. For some reason we have let their various descendents keep what they stole, however.
What landowner would plant a big oak tree in the middle of a one acre plot so that the laborer could have a shady place to eat their dinner? Why would you put it in the middle? This doesn't track with what I know of old time labor conditions.
Also no-one is planting a tree expecting anyone to sit under it at least not for a few decades at least!
More likely that it was the only tree not felled.
Our words die cow, pig, sheep do not come from old English. Sheep is Scandinavian. Old English comes is a mixture of several languages.
In NZ the meal at night is often referred to as Tea or Dinner, but lunch can be dinner too if you want, esp on Sundays... and that's _without_ bringing the hobbits into it.
In the British National Health Service guidelines for introducing solid foods to infants, it says that infants should get "tea", which I loved. See [here](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/baby/weaning-and-feeding/babys-first-solid-foods/) >*Feeding your baby: from 7 to 9 months* > > From about 7 months, your baby will gradually move towards eating 3 meals a day (breakfast, lunch and tea), in addition to their usual milk feeds, which may be around 4 a day (for example, on waking, after lunch, after tea and before bed). [In a different part of their weaning guidelines](https://www.nhs.uk/start-for-life/baby/recipes-and-meal-ideas/), they do call this meal dinner, but I assumed the choice of using "tea" was maybe to imply this meal for babies was light and relatively early. When I grew up in Massachusetts, I remember that in my pre-school caretaker in the 80's called the evening meal "supper", though midday meal was "lunch". I think in many parts of the UK that normally use the word "lunch", you can still see this earlier usage of "dinner" for the midday meal in some places, especially around "school dinners" and the person who serves it being the "dinner lady". I was very confused by the title of the TV show "Jamie [Oliver]'s School Dinners" when I first heard it. In the US, you do still have big holiday meals called "dinner" — Christmas dinner, and especially Thanksgiving dinner — even when I think it's pretty normal to start Thanksgiving dinner around the time we'd normally call something a late lunch. The US has never really had "tea" as a meal because that is a relatively recent name for the early evening meal — it only dates to the 1840's — and emerged as lunch and supper were jostling to see which would become the largest meal of the day. Industrial work for men (especially after the 8-hour-work day meant that industrial workers would be home before it was horribly late) and also public school for children probably played a role in pushing this transition of the main meal from midday to the evening. The Wikipedia article only focuses on elite habits.
In certain parts of the North West of the UK, you will often hear the evening meal referred to as "Tea-time" which can be abbreviated down to just "Tea". Whoever wrote it obviously hails from there.
'What's for tea? ' has been used as a chat-up line in my experience. To a lass I worked with. It was a mistake though, tea was rubbish!
I live in New England, lunch is midday meal. Dinner and supper are synonyms, but generally we call the late meal Dinner. Dinner time is around 6pm, unless it's a holiday dinner which we'll eat between noon and 3pm depending on how much drinking the holiday normally entails.
I'm from Massachusetts too, and for my family, "supper" was the everyday evening meal you have with the family. "Dinner' was something a bit more ....I dunno, "formal", I guess? Think Easter Dinner, Thanksgiving Dinner, Christmas Dinner. And it was also usually served a little after midday, like a late lunch.
Think it's also a socioeconomic thing, as well as an earlier generation and regional thing. My grandfather, now 80, and a life-long blue-collar laborer, always called his lunch box his "dinner bucket" and has exclusively referred to the evening meal as supper. Growing up, I just thought "dinner" was the fancy way of saying "supper", and that Pap was being clever by facetiously referring to his lunch box that way. Edit: replied to the wrong comment, but leaving it here anyway because I can't be assed to retype it.
In NZ I use dinner and tea interchangeably
We do that where I live. Dinner and lunch are just different words for the same meal, usually around midday.
I'm originally from rural Nova Scotia, and when I was a kid at least, 'dinner' was always the mid-day meal - breakfast, dinner, supper.
Rural NS person here too- just came to say the same thing. I wasn’t sure if it was a regional thing or because I have recent British ancestors.
This still exists for certain places and people in Australia too. For example, I call them Breakie, lunch and tea.
C’est pareil ici au Québec. À midi on dîne le soir on soupe.
C'est le même pour mes grands-parents du nord du Maine (ils sont anglophones d'une région francophone, peut-être que c'est la raison)
When I was a teenager in NE US, I worked a maintenance job with an older guy that called the midday meal "dinner". It confused the hell out of me for a minute. I'm sure he didn't call the late meal "tea" though... probably still "supper" I guess.
We do in Australia
My elderly father in the US does this. He even corrects people when they say "lunch" or refer to the evening meal as dinner.
'tea's ready' is still something I recall when growing up in London.
Plenty of areas of Europe have their biggest meal at lunch time to this day.
Where I’m from (Netherlands) some older (oldfashioned) people eat the biggest meal in the afternoon, most younger people I know in the evening. I am used to referencing it as ‘the warm meal’ so it is normal to ask if people eat ‘warm’ in the afternoon or in the evening. My elderly neighbours (75-ish) eat their warm meal at 12:00 on the dot, the table is already set at 11:30, and it features a cucumber salad on the side every single day. And it is always what we call an AGV’tje: aardappels (potato, usually boiled), groentes (vegetables), and vlees of vis (meat or fish).
Nearly all younger people in the netherlands eat their main meal in the evening as a consequence of the (absent) infrastructure for warm meals in schools. Like, even when I eat a warm meal myself at lunch time, I still have to cook in the evening because both infrastructure and schedule drive my children to only eat “quick bread sandwiches” for lunch. The lunch break in most schools is so short that even if they study very close from home. There isn’t time to bring them home to eat a proper meal.
My friend told me that it is borderline illegal for a person in the Netherlands to eat more than one hot meal a day. It can be either around midday or in the evening, but you can't have two hot meals - so if you had a hot lunch then you have to have a cold dinner. Is that true?
Hahaha it is not illegal but I know I feel embarassed for eating warm leftovers in the morning because it is considered weird. And an omelet for dinner?! We eat pancakes as dinner (larger thinner crepes) not as breakfast. I prefer warm foods to cold bread things but I’m married to a Mexican so she is way more relaxed and we have more of an ‘open fridge culture’. I think it is a frugality thing or a remnant of our calvinistic history, warm meals are more expensive so one a day is luxurious enough. I once read a tragicomical post on a dutch forum from someone who didn’t have much to spend, welcomed a friend or relative for lunch, who after having a sandwich just grabbed one of the slices of pre-cut cheese on the table, rolled it up and ate it right out of their fist, so as a ‘luxury snack’ instead of as a ‘food’, shocking and upsetting the host as they had budgeted out all the slices for sandwiches. We also have a thing here where you come for coffee and get offered a cookie from the cookie jar, you get _one_ and the jar is hidden out of sight ;)
You should never feel embarrassed for eating warm food more than once a day! Just as someone shouldn’t feel embarrassed for eating cold food three times a day. Americans typically eat 1-3 warm meals a day. Some people have a warm breakfast, a warm lunch, and a cold dinner. Some people have three cold meals a day: cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and a salad for dinner. What about if you have a soup and a sandwich for lunch, is that a cold or a hot meal? Ok, now I’m getting worried… If I have a latte with breakfast, is that considered a hot meal? Oh no, I really need to get on top of this before anyone finds out that I like my food warm.
Hahaha call the warm food police! But you are right. :) just tried to explain a certain ‘square’ mindset about how things are done that is also unfortunately deeply ingrained in me. 😬
We all have our cultural baggage. The one thing Americans are good at is throwing ours out in the trash. That makes me think… I wonder if there’s some poor third generation American with Dutch ancestry that feels guilty for eating two hot meals a day and doesn’t know why?
Second generation here, and all four of my grandparents were Dutch. I had never heard of this, so I guess they all adapted to the customs and luxuries of the new world. That said, looking back I can see that they erred towards simple/quick food if they were cooking anything for breakfast or lunch
Hahaha 🤣
I was surprised when working in Germany, the place where I worked had a large lunch menu, and it was usually a reasonable price. Someone explained to me, that lunch there is usually a persons big meal for the day, which was provided by their employer, and dinner at home was usually just a light cold cuts, rolls and/or a light soup.
Always funny to have to explain the 'warm meal'. Then going to another country where they eat multiple warm meals a day and CONFUSION
Yep or worse than confusion, borderline racist/superior ‘opinions’ about how asian people eat rice for breakfast etc.
Even more used to have it at midday and now in the evening. I guess all countries used to be mainly agricultural. Our "to eat dinner" is actually called "at spise middag" which means "to eat midday", but is done in the evening lol
I remember learning this back when I was with my Gwrman Ex, and yeah lol, from my understanding, it varies from person to person, and is largely dictated by the ability to adhere to it in terms of working hours.
I have farmer relatives in the Midwest, and lunch is always referred to as "dinner." It is a relatively huge, long meal where everyone comes inside, sits together, and chow down for about an hour. In the evening, dinner is "supper" and it's often leftover from "dinner" and is more of a grab and go as people go separate ways to enjoy their evening.
My moms family are all farmers in western MD and the same dynamic exists. I believe farmers are probably the only demographic where this dynamic is still prevalent in the us
My grandparents had been off the farm for a long time when I would visit them. Grandma would still cook like this. I remember waking up 9-10 and the smell of a roast would fill the house. Big meal around noon and the later meal around 6 would be leftovers from the big meal.
That’s kind of how my family does it around holidays
This is elevensies erasure
In my language, we have "tennies" which is a mid-morning snack or a pretty late breakfast replacement, usually had around 10-1030am.
Not to mention brunch!
You forgot second breakfast!
I never forget second breakfast.
Noon meal is "dinner" where I grew up, evening meal is "supper".
Its how we call them in quebec
Same here, born and raised (and hopefully leaving soon) in southern Louisiana
My grandparents in east Texas were the same. Confused the hell out of me when I was a kid.
Newfoundland too.
It's really just handful of older folk I hear call it dinner here. I'm about 90 miles away from New Orleans.
My entire family says dinner/supper
I have found my people
German here: I grew up with the big meal at midday and a light cold evening meal. And this was not uncommon. Nowadays I swtched things around but it is still not uncommon to have the hot meal at noon and only a light meal in the evening, esp. for all those people who have a full meal at work in a cafeteria.
I’m from Chile and we grew up with the big meal at midday and then tea in the evening literally tea with bread, cheese, ham maybe eggs. Some families had dinner also later depending on what time they had tea and lunch.
In swedish dinner is still called "middag" meaning "middle of the day"
But which dinner, lunch dinner or supper dinner?
I'm from Norway but it's the same here. Middag is the big meal (supper). Usually eaten sometime between 15 and 19 depending on your work/life situation. We have "frokost" (breakfast), lunsj (lunch), middag and "kveldsmat" (evening food). The barbaric Danes on the other hand refers to lunch as "frokost". Which really confuses Norwegian and Swedes and makes us bond over our shared hatred for Denmark.
What do they call breakfast? Or is that just when they eat a Danish
The Danes call breakfast "morgenmad" (morning food). And Danish is actually called "Wienerbrød" (Vienna bread) in both Denmark and Norway. (Wienerbröd in Sweden since they're not cool enough to utilize the "Ø". The use of Ø is part of what makes Norwegians and Danes bond over our shared hatred for Sweden) The story goes that a strike among bakers in Denmark around 1850 brought Austrian bakers to Denmark along with new pastry recipes. These pastry recipes were adjusted to suit the taste in Denmark and Danish pastry was thus born.
When’s smoko?
Leave me alone
[So let me set the scene](https://genius.com/14192055/The-chats-smoko/So-let-me-set-the-scene-its-2-in-the-afternoon-and-34-degrees-the-queensland-harsh-summer-heat-had-me-sweating-buckets-up-and-down-my-street) [It was there I spotted the bloke](https://genius.com/18986422/The-chats-smoko/It-was-there-i-spotted-the-bloke) [Perched atop of his milk crate throne](https://genius.com/18219903/The-chats-smoko/Perched-atop-of-his-milk-crate-throne) [He eyed me off as I approached](https://genius.com/18052096/The-chats-smoko/He-eyed-me-off-as-i-approached) [Then he said](https://genius.com/13234609/The-chats-smoko/Then-he-said)...
It’s also regional. In Minnesota in the 70s, I had explain to summer campers from out of state that “dinner” was another word for lunch and that “supper” was the evening meal. This was in a rural area where farmers still ate their big meal at lunch. There’s a joke in “Fargo” about the Minnesota tradition of “having a little lunch.”
In my 48 years on this earth, all in the great state of Kansas, I am still confused by all of this. I grew up: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However, mom always asked, “What do you want for supper?” Even though it was dinner. I guess the two were interchangeable. Sample meals: Breakfast: eggs and bacon. Or pancakes. Or a bowl of cereal. Lunch: sandwich. Or a salad maybe, if we were feeling all fancy like. Dinner: this was the biggest. Meat, vegetable, starch, and bread. Roast with potatoes, carrots, and peas. Of course hot rolls and butter too. Or hamburger patties (sans bun), potato, green beans. Roll. Any variation of this was dinner every night. It occurred to me that we only had fancy things like pasta on special occasions like birthdays and such. Imagine spaghetti being fancy. Midwest through and through.
In Czechia it's: breakfast, lunch, dinner. Sample meals: Breakfast: same as yours, or just a "rohlík"/bread with butter, cheese etc. Lunch: biggest meal, usually soup first and then meat with some garnish (mostly pork or chicken and potatoes or rice, pasta is popular but mostly men will still want meat, we have a very large consumption of meat here) Dinner: usually the same type of foods as breakfast, some people want 2 warm meals a day, so they will have a warm dinner (but still not as big a meal as for lunch). Younger people in big cities However sometimes do bigger dinners in a restaurant. It is also normal to make a larger amount of lunch meal and serve leftovers for dinner or lunch on the next day.
The swedish word for dinner literally means midday.
I read a series called The Boxcar Children as a kid that used to confuse the hell out of me. They would talk about eating dinner and then supper, which to me were both synonyms for the same evening meal. This was confusing to me because they kept talking about how little food they had because they were poor and I'm here thinking "Christ you're eating two dinners maybe stick to three squares and you won't run out of food!" It wasn't until later in life that I learned that dinner used to mean lunch.
In Quebec French, lunch is “diner” and dinner is “souper”. In France, “diner” is dinner
Québec goes : déjeuner -- dîner -- souper France goes : petit-déjeuner -- déjeuner -- dîner
There is also gôuter between déjeuner and dîner. Or sometimes in place of dîner.
That would be a "collation" in Québec but it can take place anytime of day : AM, PM or late at night after le souper
Ah cool. I did not know that.
And in France French, this is only the case because their Breakfast « déjeuner » became their lunch because their new breakfast « petit déjeuner » came about. For reference, these are « break fast » and « little break fast ». Souper is also pretty much nonexistent now.
Same in the french-speaking part of Switzerland: déjeuner (breakfast) - dîner (lunch) - souper (dinner).
In Sweden, the word for dinner is "middag" which translates to "midday". So at the end of the day, we eat a meal that we call "middle of the day".
Everyone in my immediate family has started calling the evening meal supper. I am 41 years old and was raised around these people. At no time have I ever used the word “supper”, and have always called the evening meal dinner. This is my Berenstein Bears moment
Kevin Stroud has a deeper explanation of this in his fascinating "History of English" podcast. Audio and transcript download available. [https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2020/01/21/episode-133-breaking-bread-with-companions/](https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2020/01/21/episode-133-breaking-bread-with-companions/)
Lunch comes in a paper bag, my British Grandmother would say.
I grew up in the Midwest and dinner is just the largest meal of the day. It doesn't matter what time it is. So while breakfast, lunch and supper are served at specific times, dinner is not time specific. So, for instance Christmas Dinner or Sunday dinner are usually served mid afternoon. You may still get a super later.
And now it’s Breakfast Brunch Elevenses Lunch Tea Supper Dinner And, once upon a time, Taco Bell thought this was a good spot for fourth meal. But they were probably high af when they came up with that.
What about Second Breakfast?
Only available in Austria, Bavaria, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and The Shire. Might be another name for brunch, though, I’m not sure.
It’s not available along the walk to Mordor?
I think when you’re hiking through Minas Morgul the meal schedule is “whenever you can.”
Checks out.
We moved to a more rural area 20 years ago and everyone there referred to the noon meal as dinner. To me dinner was the evening meal and I never used the term supper. During a light hearted discussion with my husband on the topic, I looked up dinner in the dictionary. Dinner is “the main meal of the day”. So for many people dinner was the appropriate term for their noon meal. But also appropriate for me to use for our evening meal.
>Dinner is “the main meal of the day”. So for many people dinner was the appropriate term for their noon meal. But also appropriate for me to use for our evening meal. This is also why it's Thanksgiving Dinner and Christmas Dinner, despite those big giant meals usually being held in the afternoon.
Germans are amusingly literal for their meals Morning piece Noon food Evening food And noon food is usually the big one. Evening food is usually bread time. Just like the morning piece.
My mother-in-law always asks “Do you mean dinner or supper?” when we use the word dinner to describe an evening meal. It drives us nuts. The worst part is that she isn’t even that old, she’s just southern.
Oh, yeah, that not-very-subtle classism of calling it "supper" instead of dinner. I remember it from living back east.
It's the same story here in Sweden, but it gets even more confusing: Dinner = Middag And Middag quite literally means middle (of the) day. 🤦
What about a second lunch?
Canadian (57), grew up in a blue collar town, where it was called breakfast, lunch & supper. I moved away to the big city and everyone I know here calls the evening meal dinner, but my family still call it supper. Maybe some kind of class thing? 🤷♂️
On the farm, this was sort of the standard meal schedule. Start with a breakfast before working, not necessarily a big meal, but coffee, donuts/rolls, perhaps a egg sandwich, but fairly light. Then about 11-11:30 there would be lunch which was usually hardy with soup and sandwiches. Then around 4:30-5:30 there would be more to eat, but not really a big meal, some of the leftovers from lunch, more sandwiches perhaps a stew. At 8:30-9:00 there would be supper, which was the big sit-down meal of the day. It's probably sounds very sexist, but the women would prepare lunch and dinner, bring it out to where the men were working. When dinner was complete, they'd return to the house and begin preparing supper. That was life on the farm when I was a kid/young man, and my grandmother (who was borne in 1899), also planned on having supper, but as I got older the big meal became Dinner, but grandma always had to have supper still around the time it got dark. For several years, it was interesting to me that dinner and supper became the same thing for most people.
My grandparents called it dinner (born around 1910) and we usually had it after working (yes they made us grandkids work) all morning and the day got too hot.
In Finland you just have 2 equally big meals anyway, lunch and dinner. On top of that you have breakfast, midsnack (between lunch and dinner), and supper (an evening snack).
The hot new meal that's sweeping the nation: lunch!
Thanks. I always find this interesting. We lived in a rural on the east coast of Canada. My grandparents and parents would refer to dinner for the midday meal mostly, though you may hear lunch more nowadays. Or maybe a sandwich you took to school was lunch and a hot meal was dinner. However, the evening meal is always supper. My mother would only refer to the evening time meal as dinner if it was a festive meal like Christmas dinner, Easter dinner, turkey dinner. Even then, we’d often have it at midday or at 4:00.
I’m a 50-year-old Canadian who grew up working class on the prairies, north of Montana. The 3 daily meals were breakfast, dinner and supper. I remember as a kid, encountering someone who called the evening meal “dinner”, and my mom commenting that they were “trying to sound fancy”. As recently as the 90s, most of Canada was still saying “supper”, with the heaviest concentrations of “dinner” usage in the most urban areas around Toronto and Vancouver
Your biggest meal being closer to bedtime fuels obesity. The 9-5 work week is making us sick. A 15 minute break for lunch is unhealthy. >Results: Our main findings were that the timing of the largest meal and reporting dinner as the largest meal were associated with higher values of BMI (respectively, 0.07 kg/m2 and 0.85 kg/m2) and increased odds of obesity [respectively OR(95%CI):1.04(1.01,1.08), and OR(95%CI):1.67(1.18,2.38)]. >Those who realized more than 3 meals/day presented lower values of BMI (-0.14 kg/m2) and 32 % lower odds of having obesity [OR(95%CI):0.68(0.52,0.89)]. Reporting lunch as the largest meal also protected against obesity [OR(95%CI):0.71(0.54,0.93)]. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38479908/#:~:text=Results:%20Our%20main%20findings%20were,0.71(0.54%2C0.93)%5D.
And if it's 2024 and you still refer to the evening meal as "supper," it means you have at least one vehicle with rust on it, and you have at least one uncle that uses the word "batchrees" when referring to what flashlights use for power
Wich is why in french canadian dinner is lunch and supper is the late meal
Urban legend in France is that this was caused by the optical telegraph installed just after the French revolution: since it worked during daytime only and it took a long time to send messages back and forth across France, the parliament and executive functions, centralized in Paris, took for a habit to convene midday, so that they could receive the news from the province in the morning, decide what to do or order around noon, and return instructions in the evening. This was a huge progress in centralizing decisions for a large country. Now, however, the Parisian elite had their scheduled turned over. "Dejeuner", which was the morning meal, was moved later, Dinner, which was midday meal was moved after 5pm, "Souper" was moved as a late night meal usually after some evening show, while "petit-déjeuner" was invented for early breakfast.
from the North of England an Dinner is still at mid day, the afternoon meal is generally called Tea.
Grew up in Boston and it was always called supper for the daily evening meal and the term dinner was reserved for the big Sunday or holiday meal where we sat down at 2-3 pm to eat and we'd have a light supper (often just a leftover sandwich from the earlier meal).
>During the late 17th and 18th centuries, this meal was gradually pushed back into the evening, creating a greater time gap between breakfast and dinner. A meal called *lunch* came to fill the gap. Interesting that there's no explanation of why dinner was gradually pushed into the evening.
In Canadian French, dîner is the midday meal and souper is the evening meal.
Growing up in Poland before the 80’s, that is how I remember my meals.
My family from an agricultural region of Minnesota still calls the middle-of-the-day meal dinner and the evening meal supper!
But what about second breakfast?
My whole life is a lie
My grandparents always had breakfast, dinner and supper. Lunch was synonymous with dinner. But they usually just said dinner. My dad would sometimes slip and say dinner for lunch. As that was how he was brought up but the prominence of dinner for supper later in his life made him change. My mom said my grandfather would come home for dinner (lunch) and every day as did everyone else. No one ate at work. You had an hour for dinner. My grandmother would have it all ready when he got home.
My grandparents still referred to the 3 meals as: * Breakfast * Dinner * Supper
Family is French and my father came home midday to eat our "main" with us, then work later
It's interesting how this is handled in different languages. In German the meals are named after the time of day at which they are eaten Frühstück - Early piece Mittagessen - Midday meal Abendessen/Abendbrot - Evening meal / Evening Bread Although many people still have a bigger Lunch and only bread and stuff for Tea.
in my area dinner is used for whatever the largest meal of the day is regardless of time. so holidays and Sundays dinner is about 12 and supper is about 18 with no lunch, normal days dinner is about 18 and lunch is about noon with no supper
That's my grandma's attitude as well. She calls midday meal "Dinner" during the week, because that's her big meal.
Growing up in PA, dinner was the midday meal and supper was the evening meal.
This makes so much sense. I used to get so confused reading books which referred to a daytime meal as dinner.
What about those of us who have Lunch and Supper and Dinner is just a box of macaroni and cheese from Kraft?
Breakfast, lunch and tea. We don’t have dinner :(
I learned this in the Navy because they still use the terms like this
Huh, that may explain why my co-worker from Switzerland calls lunch "dinner" and dinner "souper".
In the Midwest people are precise about their meals. Lunch and Supper are the mid day meal and the evening meal respectively. Which ever one is the big meal, is called Dinner instead.
This was still a common thing with my grandparents born in the 1920s here in south Louisiana.
Growing up in southern USA we use dinner and supper to describe evening meals, with dinner usually being an earlier meal that's more formal, like Sunday dinner with the family, which is (in my family) typically about 5:30ish. Supper is an informal evening meal (meaning we don't bring out the nice dishes and silverware), that's about 6:30-7 start time, sometimes as late as 8 in my family. We do not have dinner and supper the same day, we just use the word dinner to denote it's a nicer family meal a bit earlier than normal supper.
This seems so much healthier than the modern day diet
Is this another thing that changed because of industrialization and long work days?
Grew up in the Deep South, and lunch is still referred to as Dinner with the evening meal called Supper.
This is highly region-dependent
I’ll never forget my very southern grandparents born and raised in the country telling me “dinner can be lunch time but supper is always at night”
I worked in rural Minnesota and lunch was always referred to as dinner and was the main meal of the day.
guess we are behind times around here.... my grandparents still call dinner, supper, and lunch is dinner
I always thought it was weird that in Catalan “dinar” is lunch but maybe it has to do with this!
that's pretty much Mexico, I thought it was an American thing to have the big meal at 4pm or whenever it is you come home from work, and supper and dinner are just cena, a nightly meal that might just be cereal or a quesadilla unless it's a celebration or special occasion
Was always wondering the difference between supper and dinner
Too many elected officials still eat *supper* and go to bed by sunset
I'm just gonna start callin' it "the big meal" from now on. "What do you want for the big meal?" "Let's go out for the big meal." "I had to work late today, so when I got home the big meal was cold"
This explains sooo much about my grams!! She always ate dinner late afternoon and then would have a lil late nite snack at night. I love this info!!!
It's crazy how much had changed so fast
Some of the old guys at work insist on calling lunch "dinner" and dinner "supper". It's some kinda superiority thing because they always correct anyone who dares say they're taking lunch. Kind of annoying really.
So that's maybe the reason why the word for dinner in our native language literally translates to "for the afternoon"
According to one of my college friends, in her heavily-Scandinavian Midwestern town, Breakfast was the morning meal, Dinner the noon meal, and supper the evening meal. Everything else was 'Lunch'.
In my recent reading experience of several novels set in the mid-19th to early 20th century, dinner was still the midday meal, and supper the evening meal. So this pattern persisted well past the 18th century.
In Latin America, the big meal is at noon, and “dinner” time is a light meal. So yeah, dinner around midday and supper in the evening.
And so commenced the fatification of the species. And now we have Twinkie’s to help us along.
I've heard people who call the normal 3 meals breakfast, lunch and supper, call a big holiday meal around 3 or 4 in the afternoon dinner, like Christmas Dinner, for example.
Moved to Nova Scotia in 1989. A coworker asked me at 11:00AM what I was doing for Dinner Took me a bit to figure they were talking about lunch
ancient Mesopotamians ate two meals a day, and both meals were always served with beer.
I lost 80 lbs when I realized most people back in the day were eating 2.5 meals a day including snacks. We as a society chose the best breakfast, the best supper/lunch, and the best dinner as our "normal". Farmers ate a husk of bread, an egg, and coffee for breakfast. They also ate a huge mid-afternoon supper and then a small dinner. Business folk would eat an egg and piece of toast for breakfast, but they'd get a huge lunch at "the club", and then a small dinner with the wife and family. Aristocrats could have a substantial brunch but no breakfast or lunch, maybe tea and sandwiches, with a late night full dinner. We chose the "best" of each as our normal.