What do you eat for breakfast? What does that simple meal say about your role in your family, your community, your country, your culture? If you would like to add your class to the project, please click Breakfast Chart on the menu on the right.

Why Breakfast Foods? by Kathy Laughlin, Project Creator
I spent my childhood as a Global Nomad, growing up in various countries in the Middle East.  At the age of eighteen I moved with my parents to my passport holding country of Canada.  One of my most profound moments of culture shock was when I went into a modern, Western grocery store and stood in front of the breakfast isle.  I was so overwhelmed by the choices of breakfast food I saw before me, a moment I have never forgotten.

As a teacher of social studies in a middle school in Maryland, that moment has come back to me often as I teach my 7th graders about economies and cultures around the world.  Growing up in an upper middle class town just a few miles from Washington, D.C., most of my students take for granted that they can have what ever they want for breakfast; access to their desires is only a grocery store away.  This got me thinking.  As an extra credit project in our economics unit, I asked my 7th graders to go with their parents to their local grocery store and count how many breakfast cereals were available.  The number were astonishing.  In one local "gourmet" store, 241 varieties of breakfast cereal were available.  What choice!  What consumption!  What a success for supply and demand, free-market capitalism.

But what about everyone else?  What about young people in Columbia, Mozambique, or Afghanistan?  What did they have for breakfast?  Where did they get it?  How much did it cost?  Did they have breakfast? 

The goal of this project is to collect as many primary source accounts of breakfast from around the world as possible.  Our objective is to have a truly international, global, authentic collaboration with as many countries as possible from all socioeconomic backgrounds in order to educate ourselves and each other about the realities of global economics starting with something as conceivably simple as breakfast.