What is your idea of the quintessential American traditional breakfast? A couple of sunny-side-up eggs, a few sizzling strips of bacon, toast on the side, and a tall glass of orange juice? It’s so baked into the culture that calling it “traditional” feels redundant. It’s as American as apple pie, baseball, or arguing on the internet. It seems like this must be what our ancestors ate every morning while building railroads and inventing jazz, right?

Only… no. Not even close. That classic plate of bacon and eggs and juice? It’s younger than your great-grandparents’ wedding photo. Far from being some timeless culinary inheritance, it’s a carefully engineered illusion — the product of cunning marketers, psychological manipulation, and a nation’s willingness to believe anything if it comes with a side of toast. If that sounds dramatic, buckle your apron: your breakfast is basically one long commercial.

The Traditional Breakfast That Never Was

For centuries, breakfast was mostly functional — a way to shovel fuel into the human engine before a day of hard labour. In rural America, people scarfed down meat, eggs, biscuits, and potatoes to prepare for a morning of ploughing fields or chopping wood. There was no single “standard” breakfast beyond “whatever will stop me from collapsing in the hayfield by noon.”

Then the Industrial Revolution shoved half the population into cities and gave them jobs that involved more button-pushing than back-breaking. Heavy breakfasts started to feel excessive, and a new chorus of health reformers warned that big meals caused indigestion, laziness, and — somehow — moral decay. John Harvey Kellogg, for example, was convinced spicy breakfasts would inflame sinful desires, so he pushed bland cereals instead. (Because nothing cools forbidden passion faster than cornflakes.)

By the 1910s and 1920s, the typical American breakfast had become downright dainty: a roll, maybe some oatmeal, fruit, coffee. Bacon and eggs were slipping into culinary obscurity. It looked like breakfast was going soft — until one man, part publicist and part puppet master, decided to fatten it back up.

Enter Edward Bernays, the Breakfast Brainwasher (Plus: Soap, Cigarettes, and a Coup)

Edward Bernays didn’t just sell bacon. He sold behaviour. Born in Vienna on November 22, 1891, and transplanted to New York as a toddler, he grew up with a front-row seat to the human psyche: his mother was Sigmund Freud’s sister, which made him the nephew of the world’s most famous mind-tinkerer. That family connection wasn’t just trivia; it was a toolkit. Bernays absorbed the idea that people are driven by unconscious motives and figured out how to turn those urges into headlines, habits, and, conveniently, sales.

He cut his teeth as a press agent, where he learned that reframing a story could flip public opinion overnight. When a Broadway play about venereal disease scared off backers, he invented a “Sociological Fund Committee,” recast the show as a public-health crusade, and watched respectable citizens line up to applaud. Moral panic solved by marketing.

During World War I, Bernays worked with the U.S. government’s propaganda apparatus and then accompanied President Woodrow Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference. The experience gave him a lightning-bolt insight: if you can mobilize a nation for war with messaging, you can mobilize a nation for anything on Monday morning. Public relations wasn’t a side gig; it was power, neatly packaged.

After the war, he styled himself a “public relations counsel” and began collecting clients the way other people collect coffee mugs. For Procter & Gamble, he orchestrated campaigns that made plain white soap feel scientific and glamorous at once, complete with publicity stunts and endorsements that nudged Ivory to the top of America’s sink. He wasn’t around to help them with the rumor that the company was run by the Church of Satan, however.

Politics? He was happy to season that too. Calvin Coolidge had all the warmth of a granite countertop, so in 1924 Bernays staged a White House lawn party with marquee entertainers like Al Jolson to make “Silent Cal” look almost human. Newspapers ate it up, Coolidge’s image softened, and the campaign got the bounce it needed.

His most infamous mood-swing trick may be the 1928 Fifth Avenue Easter Parade. Women smoking in public was taboo, so Bernays hired models, choreographed their positions, alerted photographers, and rechristened cigarettes as “Torches of Freedom.” The next morning, papers framed the scene as modern liberation, and sales to women surged. That wasn’t luck. That was stagecraft.

The portfolio only got more audacious. For Dixie Cup, he leaned into sanitation anxiety and convinced people disposables were “cleaner” than glass. In New York politics, he coached candidates to tailor messages for specific communities to project law-and-order strength. He didn’t merely chase trends; he fabricated them, then handed them to reporters like party favours.

The darkest chapter came in the 1950s, when Bernays worked for United Fruit. He polished the “banana republic” narrative, flew American journalists to curated scenes in Guatemala, branded the democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz as a Red menace, and helped grease public opinion for a CIA-backed coup in 1954. It was marketing with a machete.

Bernays also wrote the field manual. In Propaganda (1928), he described the “conscious and intelligent manipulation” of mass habits by an “invisible government.” The line reads like villain dialogue, but for Bernays it was simply a description of modern life: the architecture of consent is built by people you’ll never meet, and you’ll happily live in the house.

The Bernays Bacon Breakfast Brainwasher

If breakfast has a villain (or a genius, depending on how you feel about cholesterol), it’s Edward Bernays. Born in Vienna in 1891 and nephew to Sigmund Freud, Bernays grew up steeped in psychoanalysis and fascinated by how unconscious desires drive human behaviour. He wasn’t content to ponder these theories — he weaponised them.

During World War I, Bernays worked for the U.S. Committee on Public Information, crafting propaganda to sway public opinion. He later reflected that if you could engineer public sentiment for a war, you could do it for anything — products, ideas, even breakfast. Thus was born the field he dubbed “public relations.” His job wasn’t to sell you bacon or cigarettes. His job was to sell you yourself — a version of you that bought those things willingly.

The Bacon Resurrection

In the early 1920s, Beech-Nut Packing Company had a problem: nobody was buying bacon anymore. So they hired Bernays to fix it. His solution was devilishly simple. He asked his company doctor whether a heavier breakfast was healthier than a lighter one. The doctor, perhaps envisioning his next pork-sponsored holiday, said yes — people lose energy overnight and need more fuel in the morning.

Bernays then asked if the doctor would write to thousands of his colleagues and ask their opinion. Soon, more than 4,500 physicians had “agreed” that a hearty breakfast — complete with bacon and eggs — was good for you. Bernays blasted that conclusion to newspapers nationwide. Headlines screamed about the health virtues of a “substantial” breakfast, and patriotic writers waxed poetic about how the young Republic had conquered continents on bacon-powered breakfasts.

The result was immediate and dramatic. Bacon sales roared back to pre-1900 levels, and Americans started to believe that bacon and eggs weren’t just food — they were a sacred morning ritual. Nearly a century later, about 70% of the bacon eaten in the United States still shows up on breakfast plates. Bernays hadn’t just sold pork. He’d rewired the public’s idea of what breakfast was supposed to be.

By the time he died in 1995 at the age of 103, he had altered everything from what Americans washed their faces with to what they ate for breakfast, from which leaders they trusted to which governments got toppled. The campaigns varied; the method didn’t. Find the hidden desire, give it a costume, arrange the photos, and let the public “decide” what it wanted all along.

Meanwhile, in Citrus Country: The Great Orange Juice Plot

While Bernays was turning bacon into a patriotic duty, another ad wizard was busy making citrus a breakfast staple. Meet Albert Lasker, the advertising powerhouse behind the Southern California Fruit Growers Association. In the early 1900s, California was swimming in oranges, and prices were tanking. People just weren’t buying enough fruit.

Lasker’s solution? Don’t sell oranges — sell drinking oranges. At the time, the average American ate about half an orange with breakfast. But a glass of juice required three or four oranges. If people could be convinced to juice their own fruit, demand would skyrocket. So in 1916, Lasker launched a campaign with the slogan “Drink an Orange” and heavily promoted a simple home juicer. Sunkist offered free juicers in exchange for orange wrappers and flooded magazines with ads touting orange juice as a health tonic.

The campaign’s real stroke of genius came from exploiting a medical panic. In the 1920s, doctors began warning about a condition called “acidosis,” supposedly caused by modern diets. Ads claimed orange juice could fight it. A Sunkist promotional proclaimed, “Estelle seemed to lack vitality; didn’t even make an effort to be entertaining; hence, she did not attract the men…’ ‘Acidosis’ is the word on almost every modern physician’s tongue.”

As it turned out, Estelle’s problems couldn’t be blamed on orange juice or the lack thereof. The whole acidosis claim was nonsense. By 1934, scientists had discovered acidosis was rare and had nothing to do with citrus. But by then, it didn’t matter. Orange consumption had skyrocketed by nearly 400%, rescuing the industry and locking orange juice into America’s morning routine.

The Juice Isn’t What You Think

Of course, the orange juice you pour today isn’t the same stuff people were juicing in their kitchens a century ago. Modern OJ is a carefully engineered product that’s been pasteurised, stored in massive tanks for up to a year, and then “re-flavoured” with chemical blends of orange oils and aromas — because pasteurisation strips most of the natural taste away. That “fresh-squeezed” flavour is more Frankenstein than Florida.

And while ads still present orange juice as a health halo, the numbers tell a less wholesome story. A typical glass contains about 27 grams of sugar — roughly the same as a can of soda. Eat a whole orange, and the fibre in the pulp slows sugar absorption. Drink the juice, and it all hits your bloodstream at once, bringing the same obesity and diabetes risks as sugary soft drinks. In other words, your “healthy” breakfast beverage is just cleverly branded soda in citrus cosplay.

Marketing Didn’t Just Sell Breakfast — It Sold Behaviour

What Bernays and Lasker did was bigger than boosting bacon or saving citrus. They changed the way Americans behaved. Bernays’ campaigns weren’t about products; they were about identity. He made smoking cigarettes a symbol of women’s liberation by rebranding them as “Torches of Freedom.” He turned Dixie Cups into a crusade against “unsanitary” glassware. He even helped fluoridate water by partnering with dentists and aluminium companies.

His biographer, Larry Tye, summed it up neatly: Bernays didn’t just sell things — he sold new ways of living. Some of his ideas were so influential that even the Nazis took notes. Joseph Goebbels reportedly kept Bernays’ book Crystallizing Public Opinion on his shelf. Bernays shrugged off the criticism, insisting that the same techniques could serve noble causes too. He did pro bono work for the NAACP and the American Cancer Society — even an anti-smoking campaign, which is rich considering his earlier cigarette crusades.

Meanwhile, Lasker’s success with Sunkist helped shape how we think about health itself. The idea that orange juice is essential to a balanced breakfast isn’t based on nutritional science. It’s based on the fact that selling juice moves a lot more oranges than selling whole fruit. And once the public bought the story, companies didn’t have to sell oranges anymore — they were selling vitality, sunshine, and the morning itself.

The Breakfast Illusion

All of this points to a humbling truth: most of what we think of as “tradition” is really marketing that’s been around long enough to feel inevitable. The idea that bacon and eggs are a wholesome breakfast is the ghost of a 1920s PR campaign. The belief that orange juice is vital to health is the afterimage of a citrus surplus. Even the phrase “part of a balanced breakfast” is a marketing slogan disguised as nutrition advice.

It’s not just breakfast, either. Many of our most beloved holidays and rituals owe their popularity to advertising. Christmas trees, Valentine’s hearts, even the diamond engagement ring all reached their current cultural heights because someone wanted to sell lumber, candy, or gemstones. The holidays that can’t be commercialised — like, say, Arbor Day — languish in obscurity. Bacon and orange juice just got there first.

The Final Bite

So tomorrow morning, when you crack your eggs, crisp your bacon, and pour your OJ, remember this: you’re not just eating breakfast. You’re reenacting a couple of the most successful ad campaigns in history. Your “traditional” morning meal isn’t some timeless heritage passed down from the Founding Fathers. It’s the handiwork of clever marketers who understood your psyche better than you do — and used it to build an empire out of fried pork and citrus pulp.

It’s a little unsettling, sure. But it’s also kind of brilliant. After all, if there’s anything “traditional” about America, it’s the American dream. The breakfast on your table is a case study in how that dream can be achieved.

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