Edible Linguistics - Some Ideas to Chew On

Doing all my research for this paper about the idea of the meal as symbolic of greater cultural norms and ideas I wanted to find a clear definition of the word and its history. Where did we get the word meal?

Indeed, I could define the word in its modern use easily enough without reference. A meal was the act of sitting down to eat or the actual prepared food itself. Still, historically I couldn't find anything. No Latin root word. No adopted slang from some Celtic tribe or whatnot. It was an linguistic mystery to me, and while I'm sure someone else may have charted it out, I had yet to find that someone or the documentation.

I could find other words, no problem. Supper was easy: "The last meal of the day; (contextually) the hour at which this is taken, supper-time; also, such a meal made the occasion of a social or festive gathering. Often without article, demonstrative, possessive, or the like, esp. when governed by a prep. (to have supper; at, to, for, after supper)" (OED). Supper was the last meal of the day, often far late in the evening between seven to nine. This two hour time span was allowed only to the truly rich who didn't have to work the daily grind; with leisure came the ability to eat at one's own pace. Dinner was taken around five or six in order to entertain guests at the spur of the moment, a luxury of the fashionable and professional classes.

Lunch way back when was actually called dinner. The working classes usually were too busy to sit down to supper so dinner was pushed back until the work shift was over. The more popular and common use of the word dinner to refer to the last meal of the day, when actually it was a delayed midday meal, became the linguistic norm.

As for lunch? The original form of the word lunch was luncheon, which referred to any casual meal throughout the day. As the working class often had to find time in the middle of their shift to take a quick bite, usually around noon, this traditional meal became adopted into popular society and over time was slanged into the word lunch.

This history was all well and good, however meal kept escaping me. Indeed, the American Heritage Dictionary and Oxfrod English both seemed to skirt about the history. However, after plenty of research and some determined pluck I think I pinned down where we actually get the term meal from in our modern vocabulary.

You see the OED noun for meal in the ceommensalitory manner is, "The edible part of a grain or pulse (now usually one other than wheat) ground to powder or granules" (OED). Now the verb form of the word is "to eat a meal, to feed". Stay with me...

Now, E.N. Anderson in his book, Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture, says "perhaps the best-known and longest running case study of change is provided by the case of bread" (171). He notes that bread is a signifier of culture, 40,000 years ago people started grinding cereals into powder, or meal, to bake into various types of breads. This milling was time consuming, requiring the work of many. As the cereals demanded intense labor, many people were brought into the process of creating the meal. Even as technology made processing meal easier it required the skills of many. Thus everyone had to gather for the meal.

As the act of processing meal gave way to machines, the phrase of sitting down to a meal stayed. As such, I propose we get the term meal from this history of bread making.

Anyways, this is simply my own postulating. I haven't had enough time to really delve into this, but I think I might have this right. Any linguists out there are free to correct me. I plan to get more regular posts about cupcakes and stupid people when I can but right now academia has consumed me. At least I found ways to make it food related, maybe by the end of all this I can publish something and become the next Pollan.