Akratismaphobia

Put simply, it’s the fear of breakfasts.

And I want to make this clear, it’s not the fear of breakfast foods. There’s plenty of folks with a fear of sausages (for obvious reasons);¹ many with allergies and actual life-threatening conditions evoked by eggs (ovaphobia); mushrooms have their wily ways so I can understand signs at fungi protests (“less rooms for mushrooms”, “I don’t trust plants that grow in the dark“ etc.);² lardaphobes (bacon fearers), have their place in the world; and that doesn’t even mention the vegan community, who live in fear of being by someone who insists they should eat bacon or else their life is meaningless (we call those lardaphiles).

And yes, it’s a real thing. There exists a charity to support those who fear breakfasts, with a full English board (director, secretary, treasurer, comms officer etc.) who have been well funded by big egg.³ It’s important they spread awareness and their most vocal activity is to remove the phrase “eat x for breakfast” as discriminatory. They’d prefer the more accepting term to be “eat x for fun between meals”, though that has the snackphobics up in arms (their suggested preferred phrasings include “eat x for a joke”, “drink x when already hydrated” or even “put x in their mouth and chew it to show how little they care” - but those with a phobia of badly contemplated phrasings are, for lack of a better word, livid).⁴

However, there are currently zero akratismaphobes registered with the Central InterPhobia Authority (CIA 2).⁵ This doesn’t mean the idea doesn’t deserve to have its own word, just that all cases of akratismaphobia either end in suicide or starvation due to the devastating prevalence and of breakfast in our world.

Curious minds may wish to explore the derivations of the word. ‘Akratisma’ is the ancient greek meal eaten just after waking, which we call breakfast, and from this the word is born. In much the same way, aristonphobes are those with a fear of lunch, from the greek word ‘ariston’. The fear of brunch therefore is akratismaphonphobia, a clever portmanteau of the two words.

Another AI image of a man fearful of his breakie

Akratismaphonphobia is much more widely appreciated, as I am yet to find someone who is altogether comfortable with the concept of brunch. Who amongst us knows what a brunch will mean? From what end of the breakfast-lunch spectrum will the menu offer? How do I time eating my other meals to make sure I’m not being greedy but hungry enough not to disappoint the chef? Brunch is so nebulous a concept that panic around eating it is natural - at to this the social anxiety a meal only ever considered for a social gatherings, and you have yourself a neurosis trap.

Curiously, a brunch offers neither breakfast or lunch; a breakfast, in my eyes, is toast or a bowl of porrdige or cereal - when a brunch dinery is clearly offering a much more calorie dense offering, often hot pork with a breakfast cake, or eggs in a starring role in an endless stream of iterations. And then there’s the lunch half of this masquerade - lunch barely gets a mention. Lunch, to my mouth, is anything from a sandwich to soup, to a panini without soup or a soup with a sarnie on the side, or just a sandwich with crisps. Therefore, your honour, a proper brunch should involve dipping sausages in soup, or a coco-pops sandwich, but no one is really brave enough to engage in the concept properly. Brunchiers, just be bold and open an Egg House or pitch yourself as an after breakfast pudding place and let’s drop the farce. But you won’t. The tax incentives are just too enticing. Hence why the Society for Akratismaphonphobes has recently doubled its membership.

Before I end, a quick note on Ancient Greek meals. There has been a recent trend on instagram for Ancient Greek restaurants, but there is a clear chasm in the standard of eateries depending on the understanding of the concept - some try to replicate the meals eaten in the society of Ancient Greece, while others believe the delicacy should be made from contemporary Greek food that has been left out for too long to become ancient - and so serve stale and mouldy pitta bread at extortionate cost.