Food Waste Friday, Augutst 12, 2011

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. 

Here it goes for this week.

Baked beans for Breakfast?

We've gotten back into the swing of things after vacation, so we have no food waste this week. Yeah!

So instead of reporting about our waste, I am going to do a follow up on a posting from a couple of weeks ago when we were on vacation. I observed that our hotel in Toronto served baked beans every morning for breakfast. This was something new for me. Apparently, it's not new for everyone else.

My interest was piqued when my brother-in-law said that his grandfathers had had baked beans for breakfast every morning. The were both French Canadian, but lived most of their lives in New England. After this, I began mentioning this different (for me) breakfast item to others and got varying responses.

• One person said that when she traveled to London, they served baked beans for breakfast every morning. They told her it started in WWII when rations were scarce and baked beans were one of the few things they could get.
• Another friend said that her English grandfather, who immigrated here, was eating beans on toast every morning long before WWII.
• Someone else, who has relatives in Ontario and has traveled there often, said that she had never heard of baked beans for breakfast.
• My friend from Germany had never heard of this custom.

Just enough variety in the answers to leave me still curious. Next, I visited with my friends Google and Wikipedia and here are some conclusions from that search.

• Baked beans are considered part of a full (big) breakfast in England.
• They are also common for breakfast in Ireland, Scotland, Quebec, and Australia.
• They probably were a fixture in England long before WWII according to the Guardian of the UK. Heinz baked beans first arrived in London in 1886, and Heinz remains the favorite brand in England today. As for WWII involvement in this story, they did stop manufacturing the beans with pork during this time because of the scarcity of meat.

So, I know a little more than when I started, but many questions still remain.What's your experience with this breakfast tradition?