Originally published by The Clifton Courier, February 10

I know someone with very strong feelings about bananas. 

This opinion-haver says the fruit – which, after a quick Google, I’ve learned is botanically a berry – has no place being eaten after lunchtime. He says it’s a morning fruit and recoils at the idea of bananas in dessert form. 

Personally, I disagree. In fact, a cracking desert is a few slices of banana being fried in a bit of butter and then being slopped on a bit of Greek yoghurt with some shredded coconut. 

I thought it extremely close-minded of him to completely shut off a food just because of where the little hand happened to be pointing to on a clock, you know?

Like, I like to think of myself as a free spirit. A renegade. Someone who doesn’t confirm to the norms of society, mahn. I mean, I detest those meal delivery boxes that force you to cook according to their strict regulations and use only the meagre provisions they provided. I can’t follow those kinds of rules. As that unnamed spice company’s commercials say, “why cook when you can create?”

When I was a youngster, I was always rubbish at colouring in competitions because I never coloured between the lines.  And, yes, it may have been because I was messy and lacked the fine motor skills to stay within the lines, but I tell myself that it was because I couldn’t conform to the constraints of the lines before me.

So I thought I wasn’t someone who restricted themselves to these petty kitchen rules. 

But then, as I thought about it more, I began to realise that I actually held a lot of discriminatory views on foods.

Sure, there’s some elements to this that are purely chemical and biological. You’re probably not going to have an espresso right before you go to bed. And you’re probably not going to have mug of warm milk right before going for your morning jog.

But I hold some morning and evening food stipulations that, upon reflection, just don’t really make sense. It’s like these ideas about the appropriate time of day to consume a certain food are hardwired into my brain, but I never think about it. 

Here’s a few examples. 

I think you can only really have pancakes for breakfast, but I’m fine with pikelets for afternoon tea, even though pancakes and pikelets are pretty much the same thing. Like, I’d call a glob of batter cooked in butter in a frypan a pancake before 10am but anytime after that, I would classify it as a pikelet. 

A sausage could never be breakfast when presented only in a single piece of bread with onions and eaten with bare hands. That’s strictly a lunch, swimming club breakup dinner or hardware impulse buy kind of thing. I mean, it’s kind of the novelty of it. It’s an occasional thing -Like, you wouldn’t typically serve is a breakfast food but you could – and many do – eat on at breakfast time based on where they are (such as, for example, a particular brand of hardware store). It’s kind of like microwaving pizza from the night before for breakfast the next day. You wouldn’t usually go out of your way to prepare a pizza for breakfast, but you’ll eat it because it’s there and the idea of eating something at a time when you don’t usually eat it fills you with a thrill you don’t want to unpack too much because then you might realise that this microwaved pizza is the only thing you’ve been excited about in four months. But as soon as you start eating a sausage with a knife and fork, it becomes a conceivable breakfast food.

Corn is something you eat at a barbecue. Or in a cobb loaf. You pop it, smother it in butter and jam it into your mouth like you haven’t eaten in 14 days while you watch a movie at night. Corn is only an afternoon or evening food. But then you stir some kernels into a batter and turn it into fritters, maybe chuck a poached egg and some avocado onto the plate and by gumbo it’s a bloody breakfast thing. 

Eggs are absolutely a breakfast food. Poached, scrambled, fried, boiled. They’re all good. But while I love an egg and lettuce sandwich, I would never eat one for breakfast. Ever. The very idea of it makes me queasy. Because an egg and lettuce sandwich is very much a lunchtime food. Maybe it could be a morning tea food if it’s cut into tiny portions and served alongside assorted slices. Whatever if is, it’s certainly not a breakfast food.

And what about bacon? By itself, bacon is a classic breakfast food, but I’d never cook up a bunch of bacon for lunch or dinner. It has to be in something and it’s never in one full rasher that you eat with a knife and fork like you do at breakfast, it’s always chopped up – like when it’s in a risotto or sprinkled over baked potatoes.

It seems I’m not as free-spirited in the kitchen as I thought.