Breakfast Redeemed

I usually skipped actual breakfasts in college. It always felt like an unnecessary speed bump to the momentum I needed for the day. Ironic, I know. If I ate an omelette, or anything really that comes on a plate and can’t be held in one hand without falling apart, I would have a moderate to severe food coma while working. If I lived my own best life, I wouldn’t eat breakfast at all. Without breakfast, I felt lean and agile. But all the college nutrition presentations and shaming from adults guilted me into eating at least something. I didn’t know if intermittent fasting could be trusted, so I bent to the wisdom of a good phrase: it’s the most important meal of the day! And it’s grrrreat if you have the right cereal. So every time I ate nothing for breakfast, I felt that I was foolishly trading nutrition for a temporary feeling of agility.

In college, I usually had an apple if my refrigerator was stocked, or a toasted bagel if I got out of bed at the time I set on my alarm clock. Breakfast was an obligation, a tax I paid to feel like a non-slacker citizen. In Hong Kong, however, breakfast options are my favorite things to eat. Most of my favorite foods are all concentrated in the breakfast options. Glutinous rice wrapped with tea leaves (粽子). Shumai (燒賣) and cheung fen (腸粉) for breakfast, yes please. Even the lowbrow insult-to-steam-buns steam buns at a 7-Eleven make my mornings. The pot pies are stuffed with cha siu pork, the kind of pork found in cha siu baos. The quiche at the Western coffee shop somehow tastes softer. And the bread! Sliced bread is not humanity’s best innovation to bread. The buttery, puffy bread here is. Sometimes I break off bits to dip in the congee. Hong Kong residents know how to breakfast.

This is the menu at one of the food carts on our campus. My goal is to be able to read all the items on this menu and order in Cantonese by the end of the semester. In the meantime, I’ve been learning to use google translate really well..

My morning routine changed to make room for this newfound necessity of my day. Toeing the boundary of food coma is also made easier because the entrees are small, and I can order or combine orders in just the right quantity. That said, I don’t know if my love for breakfast food here might also be the product of my new love for breakfast time. I have more time to pace my mornings, and to take normal-sized bites rather than always biting off more of that bagel than I could chew while walking. All I know is, I plan on making the most of all the HK breakfasts I have left while I can. Legend has it everyone here gets up so early because the scent of breakfast jolts them out of bed with excitement. I just made that up, but it’d be a good legend to tell.