‘One of the stupidest things in an earnest but stupid school of culinary thought is that each of the three daily meals should be ‘balanced’.” So argues American food writer MFK Fisher in her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf. She goes on: “In the first place not all people need or want three meals each day. Many of them feel better with two or one and one-half, or five.”

Fisher wrote her book ostensibly as a guide on how to feed yourself pleasurably and nourishingly during a period of food shortages caused by war, but there is much in her insightful advice to inspire and provoke us today. More than 80 years later, threats to the sacred breakfast-lunch-dinner mode of eating can still make the news: “A nation of snackers: Britons no longer eat three meals a day”, gasped one recent headline in the Times. Deviations from the “standard” model are the subject of research by academics and health professionals, and food retailers commission studies in an attempt to understand (and shape?) when and how customers consume their food.

The idea that we should sit down for three meals at roughly the same time every day has become such an essential part of how we organise our lives – even when we’re failing to do it – that we forget it isn’t the natural order of things. Instead, it is a regime that was created not to serve the needs of our bodies or to give us pleasure, however much we may have managed to adapt it for these purposes – but to fit in with a day of labour. Like many of the ways that we live now, it has its roots in the Industrial Revolution: that was when breakfast became a brief meal eaten before the working morning, lunch something light but fortifying to be wolfed down quickly in the days before breaks were paid, and dinner a final sitting when everybody had finished in the evening. Before this people had of course eaten meals but they were made up of different foods and historically slipped around in terms of timing.

The last time I ate three meals a day, I was still in high school. This has caused relationship issues over the years, given that “I only eat when I’m hungry” seems nonsensical to many. I generally like to eat a decent meal sometime in midafternoon to evening and otherwise snack as needed.