Lunch is sangers, dinner is bangers. Learn the rules, people!

Last week, a friend suggested we catch up for lunch. I love lunch! I agreed. The friend suggested we catch up at a fancy burger joint for our lunch. I love burgers!

I declined.

You call that lunch? Hold the fries … and the burger.Credit: Simon Schluter

Burgers, you see, are a dinner food. And it is unacceptable to eat dinner foods for lunch.

There are rules to meals. There is an order to the culinary universe. Breakfast is cereal or toast with toppings, lunch is a sandwich or a salad, and dinner is everything else. Meat, vegetables, pastas, stir fries, pizzas, pies and, of course, burgers, can only be eaten in the evening.

OK, so it’s slightly more complex than that, but the laws are intuitive. Like the rules of grammar, you simply pick them up as you go. For example, two pieces of toast with toppings makes for a classic Australian breakfast. But two pieces of fresh bread encasing a filling is a sandwich, and a sandwich is lunch. Eggs are definitely breakfast, and veggies like spinach and mushrooms are great. But fried potatoes for breakfast? That’s an absolute no.

Spinach can be included in a breakfast, but lettuce? Definitely not. A side of bacon is breakfast, but a side of chicken legs is clearly dinner. Minestrone soup can be lunch, but a beef stew, although also wet, can only be dinner.

There’s another layer, however, to the comestible conventions, and this is where it gets interesting. Breakfast is breakfast, but breakfast can also be lunch or dinner. You can eat breakfast at absolutely any time of the day! Scrambled eggs with vegemite toast and a cappuccino at 1pm? Absolutely ideal. A bowl of cornflakes with sliced banana for a light evening meal? Honestly, aspirational.

Lunch is lunch, but lunch can also be dinner. A sandwich or big salad is far easier to prepare than meat and three veg, and can be just as satisfying. Follow it up with a nice cup of tea and you can retire to bed happy.

But this, you see, is where the flexibility ends. Early meals can be substituted for all later meals, but no later meals can be eaten earlier in the day.

Now, rules are made to be broken, and people do break the culinary ones. Even I have, on occasion, eaten dinner for lunch, nearly always due to circumstance or peer pressure. I have attended lunchtime barbecues, or fancy long lunches at restaurants, or formal daytime weddings, and eaten dinner food in the early afternoon. I do it when necessary, but there are consequences to these infractions, and I am utterly ruined for the rest of the day.

When lunch is a sandwich, I bounce through the afternoon. When lunch is steak and baked potato, or a burger and fries, or roast chicken and a dinner roll followed by cake and truffles, I need to go immediately to sleep. And then I wake up and drag myself through the rest of the day, and then evening comes and I am not hungry, because I ate a huge lunch, but it’s mealtime, so I feel like I want to eat, so I have a bit of fruit, which is unsatisfying, and then I can’t sleep at night, because I’ve slept for two hours, and then it’s 11pm and I’m starving because I haven’t eaten dinner.

You can see the problem. It’s a gastronomic disaster.

Now, I know there are people who will beg to differ, people who will down enormous carnivore breakfasts and power through their days. “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper!” they will proclaim, in between mouthfuls of pot roast or slabs of beef.

But I am not a king! Kings are free to take afternoon naps on the couches in their quarters, and if they are too tired to pick up the kids from school their valet can do so for them. I am but a commoner, who needs to stay awake and alert, and make dinner for my kids, who only ate sandwiches for lunch.

If you want to meet me for lunch, please just choose a nice café. And if you’re having a noontime barbecue, thank you, but I’ll just have the salad.

Kerri Sackville is an author, columnist and mother of three.