I call the evening meal supper but those of you who call the evening meal dinner must be correct. All the proof we need is Leonardo di Vinci's famous painting The Last Dinner. No, wait! I'm sorry. That painting is called The Last Lunch. I rest my case.
This is funny but very true. This painting was called the Last Supper. The thing is though in society over the years we have started to refer to these meals in a different way. We now refer to them as breakfast, lunch and dinner. Where as it use to be breakfast, dinner and supper.
Same here. The three meals are breakfast, dinner, and supper. Lunch is something that you pack, or it might refer to a quick meal that doesn't fall into either of the other classifications, and brunch is something that was made up by restaurant owners who were trying to get customers in during the slow periods.
Breakfast, dinner & supper with a lunch in between is always a great time to enjoy food. Entertaining with food and friends is another time we take a bite to eat. Whatever the situation is taking time to nourish oneself is always a good thing to do. I enjoy a light snack too every now and then. Food is always great to have. Now with many fast restaurants you have greater choices during the day & night to have a quick picker-upper of food. Now days fast food restaurants have fruits & veggies too so it makes eating healthier too! Always have time to eat!
As I am soooo famous for doing, may I humbly throw a monkey wrench into the gears? "Cena" in Italian means, Dinner. l'ultima indicates "the last or greatest." Therefore l'ultima cena is only loosely translated as the last supper when it can actually mean "dinner." My wife and I prefer to name the late meal........."It's ready!"
Traditionally, the noon meal was the largest meal of the day, at least when we were an agricultural nation. Besides, who cares what the Italians think of something? How often have you had a great idea, then thought, "But what would the Italians think?"
I don't know if you guys are playing tricks on me, huh. Lunch is something that is packed and the square meals are breakfast, dinner and supper. What a repast. Seriously though, supper is an old term, that's according to our teacher because it was once a topic in our English class in high school. Dinner is a modern term used in America while supper is an archaic term used by old English (people). I don't know if this holds true because you are the Americans who should know. But at least we agreed on breakfast as the first meal of the day - breaking the overnight fasting. The midday meal here is lunch but brunch is getting popular especially on weekends. And after dinner, there's the midnight snack. But I guess that's another thing.
This probably makes the most sense. The English Language & Usage site states: Traditionally, in agricultural America, people would come home for dinner at noon. Schools were neighborhood schools so, while some school children would take a lunch, others came home for dinner. During the planting and harvest seasons, many male children didn't attend school, but worked on the farm. So the noon meal was the larger meal. As the country moved from an agricultural to an industrial society, and schools consolidated so that children were bused to school each day, that was no longer the case in most families, although many retained the original wording of breakfast for the morning meal, dinner for the noon meal, and supper for the evening meal. I couldn't find it when I looked today, but there was a site online that had a map indicating the parts of the United States that used the various choices, and it was principally the South, Midwest, and some other states, such as Maine, that were largely agricultural, that used the breakfast, dinner, and supper arrangement.
In my part of the world people ate breakfast, took a lunch to work or school then had supper in the evening. Dinner was the term used for a special meal such as Sunday Dinner, Thanksgiving Dinner, Or going out to dinner at a restaurant. But, but Bobby I don't speak Italian. Every reference I've ever seen of the painting calls it the last supper.