THE END IS NIGH, THANKS TO BRUNCH

ne of the glorious things about food is how it breaks up the day. After a rested night there’s breakfast. The morning — feasibly punctuated by a cup of coffee, a bite of fruit, a biscuit even — is followed by lunch. The afternoon drifts on with a pause possibly for a cup of tea and, who knows, a stolen moment of bliss with a piece of cake. Then there is dinner. At 8pm. It all sounds so simple. So straightforward. So sensible.

There was some interference with this perfect order of things a few years back when some experts, aka lunatics, suggested that it was better if you grazed all day. With your desk a forest of dried apricots, nuts and tiny pieces of ethically garnered high-quality chocolate you would nibble your way to yogic harmony.

Except you wouldn’t. Along would come those meals and you’d eat them, too. So all grazing amounted to was eating between meals. And where I come from we were taught early and often not to eat between meals. So I don’t.

Thus my battle to retain the traditional eating timetable appeared to be going my way. That was until brunch came along — an idea that mixes the menus between the two concepts and moulds them into a funky, new creation that starts a good while after breakfast finishes, and considerably earlier than when lunch begins. And whose finishing time is beyond definition, or even after 3pm.

The problem is brunch is not just a quirky US invention that takes the “br” from breakfast and adds it to lunch’s “unch”. It’s actually symbolic of a cultural malaise. Just take a look at all those halfbaked, hungover, unwashed beings proud to be knackered and semi-comatosed, barely able to speak and only just about bright enough to be able to stare at their mobiles, who make up the majority of those who brunch.

Enough already. Surely it is the imperative of the intelligent human to get up for breakfast. In which case you’re too full for brunch, the consumption of which would muddle your appetite for lunch. And if you eat brunch, what time do you lunch? 4pm? Then what about dinner? The ordered and sensible timetable of dining collapses. Men and women fail to break bread properly at the table, social interaction dissipates, families then communities fracture, world peace is potentially threatened.

This meandering meal, once just a Saturday atrocity, now consumes Sunday and is edging into the week. I’m not alone in calling for a ban on brunch. The brilliant US chef Anthony Bourdain says those who brunch are “dreaded by all dedicated cooks . . . We despise hollandaise, home fries, those pathetic fruit garnishes and all the other cliché accompaniments designed to induce a credulous public into paying $12.95 for two eggs.’’

It’s time the bedraggled brunchers grew up and then got up for breakfast. — © The Daily Telegraph, London