How It's Used

"I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quick-sands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion."

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods (1854).

"Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possible now to keep count of the passage of time, if he had felt any interest in doing so, since he was being fed at what appeared to be regular intervals. He was getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food was surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal."

—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949).

—Ernest Beyl, “My Father the Sous-Chef:  As a young kitchen hand, one cook found a mentor in Victor Hirtzler, an original celebrity chef,” Saveur, January/February [200?], p. 36.

“Anthony Trollope, in Australia in the 1870s, reduced the whole matter of what lay behind the migration to Australasia to one sentence:  ‘The labouring man, let his labour be what it may, eats meat three times a day in the colonies, and very generally goes without it altogether at home.’”

—Alfred W. Crosby. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Second Edition. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 300.

"Patsy’s mom, chainsmoking in her doorway, watching the comings and goings of her neighbors with her witchy black eyes, was weird—you had to pretend to be in a big hurry when you walked by or she’d try to involve you  in some long, urgent off-key conversation—and so was Janet’s mom, pacing her beautiful brownstone like a panther, turning out the occasional wild, huge oil painting in between the children, the husband, the three meals a day.”

—Katha Pollitt. Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories. (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 171.

Links

Related on eAlmanac
Elevenses
The Food Pyramid
Square Meals

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on Meals