Is cereal a real meal?

Whether cereal is nutritionally perfect isn't really the point. A bowl with milk feeds you. The discomfort usually comes from the idea that dinner was supposed to look different — something cooked, something hot, something that took time and looked like effort.

What “real meal” was actually measuring

For a long time, a real meal meant something prepared for other people. A pot on the stove. A table set. Plates passed around. Evidence that someone had been taken care of.

The standard was never only about the food. It was also about the effort being visible to someone else. That pressure can return when someone else is coming to dinner, when an ordinary meal suddenly begins to feel as though it must prove something.

Take away the someone, and the rule stops making quite as much sense. There is no one whose evening improves because dinner took forty minutes instead of four. No one measuring whether the meal came from a pan or a box.

The rule about what counts as a real meal was written for a kitchen with more than one person in it.

Eating cereal for dinner alone doesn't break the rule. It reveals that the rule was never really about the eating.

For years, dinner may have been one of the ways you took care of other people. A spouse. Children. A full table. When those people are gone — through loss, divorce, or children growing up — the habit remains. You can find yourself trying to cook for an audience that no longer lives in the house.

The instinct to make something proper can outlast the reason for it by a long time. Recognizing that the instinct is inherited, not required, is often enough to let it go on a Thursday night.

The nights cereal is exactly right

Cereal tends to appear on a certain kind of evening. The tired ones. The nights when cooking feels like one demand too many, when the goal is not to create a meal worth admiring, but simply to eat.

There is no need to justify it with a particularly difficult day. Sometimes cereal is simply what sounds good. That is reason enough.

Dinner when you live alone does not have to answer to anyone else's definition of dinner. There is relief in a meal that asks almost nothing of you. No chopping. No timing. No pan to scrub afterward.

That relief is not a lesser version of satisfaction. Some nights, it is the whole point.

The cereal will still be there next Thursday, and the Thursday after that. That is fine. No one is keeping score of how often dinner came from a box instead of a pan.

The only measure that matters is whether you were fed. By that measure, cereal counts every time.

Pour the milk. Eat it standing at the counter if that is easier tonight. Sit at the table if that helps. Either way, it was dinner.

— Chuck