At long last, meal stagflation is over; food industry pushes 'fourth meal'

One of the great American tragedies is that, while we have shown tremendous progress in many areas of math, science and arts, the number of meals we eat each day remains stuck on three.

Since I was a child, the price of gasoline has soared, along with our national GDP. Assembly line production has skyrocketed, along with our abilities to measure climatic change and see deep into space.

Yet here we sit, mired in meal stagflation, miserably eating the same breakfast, lunch and dinner again and again, with a dismal, metronomic consistency.

In agriculture, the gap between what we produce and what we consume continues to widen. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this unsustainable model is primed to blow up like a regional bank.

Fortunately there is hope. While a gridlocked government has failed to solve the crisis, count on American industry to step forward and say “Yes we can!” by creating a category of late-night meals that are co-marketed as “sleep enhancers.”

The Washington Post says, “Marketing late-night meals as sleep enhancers is a way for the food industry to achieve one of its longtime objectives: To boost sales by creating a so-called fourth meal that follows dinner.”

How great is that? They’re like Homer Simpson; they’ve discovered a new meal between breakfast and brunch. Because heaven knows we don’t get enough to eat as it is. And forget all that junk about bedtime being the worst time to eat. Swap out that teddy bear in for a chocolate bunny; your kids will love you for it.

Among those leaping into the fray is Post Consumer Brands, which is marketing a new cereal called Sweet Dreams, with ingredients that include lavender, chamomile and melatonin.

Brilliant. Not only does it create a fourth meal of the day, it also solves the nation’s growing insomnia problem. Trouble sleeping? Eat yourself into a food coma before bedtime. (Forget that chamomile cereal is about as appetizing as Fruity Pebbles tea.)

Matter of fact, why stop at cereal? Why not eat an entire Thanksgiving turkey at 11 o’clock and night? Whoops, did I say that? Then I must be a genius, because that’s exactly what the food industry is headed toward.

“It’s a potential new eating occasion,” said Nicholas Fereday, the executive director of food and consumer trends at investment firm Rabobank. “If they can somehow turn it into a ritual, and it becomes more habit rather than the occasional thing, they’ll start getting their repeat purchases.”

A potential new eating occasion. PNEO. Perfect. Invite your friends. If you can throw a dinner party, certainly you can throw a Potential New Eating Occasion Party. We need a better name for it, though — Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Evenhog.

But that still leaves a lot of non-eating hours between 11 at night and 7 in the morning. I’m sort of disappointed that Archer Daniels Midland hasn’t invented a machine that wakes you up at 2:30 a.m. and stuffs an entire packaged pizza and two gallons of corn syrup down your gullet.

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Of course the Debbie Downers in the press and the nutrition agencies are Frowning With Concern at the idea, as is, oddly enough, supermarket trade press, which views the fourth meal as a “call to action” because — stick with me here — they fear night-owl restaurants like Denny’s and Taco Bell are stealing market share. Their solution? To keep from getting hungry at night, eat more food during the day. But of course.

Nutritionists also unhelpfully point out that fourth meal foodstuffs tend to be sugary, which inhibits sleep. Hey look, give them time. Innovation doesn’t happen overnight, and my guess is that after some “trial and error” they’ll ditch the lavender and chamomile, and just grind up a sack of Ambien and throw it into the vat.

But not too much — they don’t want you so groggy in the morning that you aren’t ready for breakfast.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: 'Sleep enhancers' and 'fourth meal' just the thing America needs