Joe

The fry-up has been quietly demoted, over the last forty years, from a daily British breakfast to a Saturday indulgence. A hangover meal. A guilty pleasure. The kind of thing you order in a Wetherspoons at half past eleven on a Sunday with a slightly apologetic look at the waitress, on the understanding that you will be having a salad for dinner to make up for it. Your nutrition app flags it. Your doctor sighs at it. The newspaper runs an article every six months explaining that it will kill you. This is one of the great practical jokes of modern British life. The traditional Full English is one of the most nutritionally complete breakfasts a human being can sit down to. Two eggs from a hen that scratched about in a back garden, eating grubs and kitchen scraps. Complete protein, choline, B12, vitamin D, the whole fat-soluble suite delivered in a yolk the colour of a marigold. Two rashers of dry-cured back bacon from a Wiltshire pig. Stable saturated fat, B vitamins, selenium. A pork sausage made that morning with three ingredients by the village butcher. A grilled tomato. Mushrooms cooked in the bacon fat. Black pudding for the iron. A slice of fried bread. A pot of tea strong enough to stand a teaspoon in. This breakfast fuelled the men who dug the coal, laid the railways, fished the North Sea, and walked twelve miles a day delivering the post. Their cardiovascular disease rate was a fraction of ours. Their diabetes rate was a rounding error. Their obesity rate was zero. Then sometime around 1985 we were told this breakfast was killing us. We were instructed, by people in offices, to switch to a bowl of corn flakes with skimmed milk. To a yoghurt with fourteen ingredients. To an oat milk latte. To a green smoothie containing more sugar than a can of Coke. The cardiovascular disease rates climbed. The diabetes rates climbed. The obesity rates climbed. The breakfast did not change. The advice did. The advice was wrong. A plate of eggs, bacon, sausage, and black pudding will outperform any breakfast designed by a wellness brand in a Shoreditch office. It costs less. It contains no seed oil. It has been keeping the British upright since the Iron Age. Your grandfather did not feel guilty about his breakfast. He had bigger things to worry about. So do you. Eat it on a Tuesday. Without apologising.

$SamaHoole's tweet photo. The fry-up has been quietly demoted, over the last forty years, from a daily British breakfast to a Saturday indulgence. A hangover meal. A guilty pleasure. The kind of thing you order in a Wetherspoons at half past eleven on a Sunday with a slightly apologetic look at the waitress, on the understanding that you will be having a salad for dinner to make up for it. Your nutrition app flags it. Your doctor sighs at it. The newspaper runs an article every six months explaining that it will kill you. This is one of the great practical jokes of modern British life. The traditional Full English is one of the most nutritionally complete breakfasts a human being can sit down to. Two eggs from a hen that scratched about in a back garden, eating grubs and kitchen scraps. Complete protein, choline, B12, vitamin D, the whole fat-soluble suite delivered in a yolk the colour of a marigold. Two rashers of dry-cured back bacon from a Wiltshire pig. Stable saturated fat, B vitamins, selenium. A pork sausage made that morning with three ingredients by the village butcher. A grilled tomato. Mushrooms cooked in the bacon fat. Black pudding for the iron. A slice of fried bread. A pot of tea strong enough to stand a teaspoon in. This breakfast fuelled the men who dug the coal, laid the railways, fished the North Sea, and walked twelve miles a day delivering the post. Their cardiovascular disease rate was a fraction of ours. Their diabetes rate was a rounding error. Their obesity rate was zero. Then sometime around 1985 we were told this breakfast was killing us. We were instructed, by people in offices, to switch to a bowl of corn flakes with skimmed milk. To a yoghurt with fourteen ingredients. To an oat milk latte. To a green smoothie containing more sugar than a can of Coke. The cardiovascular disease rates climbed. The diabetes rates climbed. The obesity rates climbed. The breakfast did not change. The advice did. The advice was wrong. A plate of eggs, bacon, sausage, and black pudding will outperform any breakfast designed by a wellness brand in a Shoreditch office. It costs less. It contains no seed oil. It has been keeping the British upright since the Iron Age. Your grandfather did not feel guilty about his breakfast. He had bigger things to worry about. So do you. Eat it on a Tuesday. Without apologising.$