Sunday Brunch, The Fault in Our Stars, and the Holy Scrambled Egg
In popular young adult novelist John Green’s latest bestseller, The Fault in Our Stars, teenage protagonist Hazel Grace Lancaster ponders many situations of love, life, death, and young adulthood, yet there are none that she more passionately and hilariously argues against than the “ghettoization of breakfast foods.” In a lighthearted argument with her parents, Hazel rallies for the ability to eat entrees like scrambled eggs without having to refer to what she’s eating as “breakfast.”
I agree with Hazel, due to the fact that the labeling of scrambled eggs, crisp bacon (as Tufts Dining calls it), pancakes, and certain other dishes are typically only served during breakfast hours on campus.
The Sunday brunch is the perfect antithesis to most days of the week, when all of the delicious eggs, bacon, yogurt, granola, bagels, and other “breakfast foods” are gone or scantily available by 11 AM (which is still in the morning, thank you very much). After all, if I’m going to be spending my lazy Sunday hanging out in sweatpants and reading hundred-page long textbook assignments, then I might as well feel like Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation while doing it.
Although brunch is considered by the characters of How I Met Your Mother to be a typically romantic outing, my Sunday brunch is a feast of solitude, as I do all the homework I carefully neglected while watching Netflix sitcoms on Friday and Saturday.
I can’t help but love being able to partake in events such as “breakfast for dinner” or simply to be able to get my wake-up food at noon on my days off, because to quote Hazel, “I [have] a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I [am] not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.” And, of course, by “before dawn,” I mean “before noon,” for I am a lazy little night owl, you see.
In response to Hazel’s concerns, another important character in the story suggests that the limitations surrounding breakfast foods could be referred to as sanctification rather than ghettoization. Would scrambled eggs and bacon be less delicious if they were available during all dining periods at Tufts? Probably not, but the satisfaction of waking up to them before my morning classes would surely be lost.