This piece (linked below), with an adorable slideshow from The New York Times on what children eat for breakfast all over the world, is fascinating. As the writer points out in the introduction, many cultures eat savory and even spicy foods for breakfast – or ones that aren’t overly sweet. Our American culture favors a sugary morning start often via “kid-friendly” breakfast cereals that are usually stocked in grocery stores at children’s eye-level. Though sweet is an easy sell for kids, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to introduce them to other, perhaps healthier, alternatives. I vividly recall my time teaching English at a university in Taiwan. Every morning, the students would come with a little bag full of garlic-laden green onion cakes or beef buns bought from street stands. A smell that I would have relished come lunch time often turned my stomach at 8 a.m.; it just wasn’t something I’d been conditioned to eat in the morning. Initially, I issued a “no eating in class” rule to ward of nausea. But little by little, it grew on me until I, too, was grabbing them en route to school. We’re not alone though; check out what young Viv Bourdrez eats for breakfast in Amsterdam: a piece of bread topped with chocolate shavings; or Tiago Bueno Young, who’s Brazilian breakfast consists of cornflakes, banana cake and a sweet white bread. With a meal like that why the long face?! Perhaps the most “foreign” breakfast is that of the Japanese – one which I encountered on a two-week trip there reporting on Japanese inns and the meals they serve for dinner and breakfast. As with little Koki Hayashi in this piece, I too, ate raw egg over hot rice. While I didn’t have the green pepper stir-fried with tiny dried fish, I did often have an actual piece of cooked fish over rice with miso soup. If trying to stomach savory beef buns in Taiwan was tough, eating fish for breakfast was nearly impossible. Yet once I got over the strangeness of it, I did find that the high-protein content kept me full for much longer than was usually the case following breakfast. Like the article points out, it’s all about “enculturation.” Check out the slideshow and the seven countries featured; maybe you’ll be inspired to give your own breakfast a reboot. If nothing else, the kids are super cute.