Breakfast, time, and 'Breakfast Time': television, food and the household organisation of consumption.

Based on the premise that public time, sustained through broadcasting, is central to the social organisation of the home, this article focuses on two components of domestic consumption. Evidence of broadcasting’s embeddedness in domestic organisation suggests that it can provide a framework for sequencing and sustaining household routines. How this is so remains to be fully understood. Being exclusive and extensive, the household presents special difficulties for study. Able to draw on two different but complementary studies that were initiated quite separately from each other, this article illustrates the utility of an ethnographic attitude in the investigation of domestic interiors. The first study was primarily concerned with the study of household television use; the second with the range of forces shaping young people’s conceptions of food and eating. Drawing on empirical material from both these studies, the article takes as its case example the meal known in the West as ‘breakfast’.