dinner [DIN-er]: n. Whatever the hell I say it is

Recently and frequently, I have found myself quite on the defensive in a couple of debates over the definitions of certain food-related terms, specifically "dinner" and "sandwich".  "Ehab!" you have undoubtedly exclaimed. "How can there be any debate? Dinner is obviously the third meal of the day."

Oh, reader.  You think with the simplistic naïveté of a child.  I want nothing more than to pat you on the head and say, with the condescending smile of someone who has seen too much, "Of course it is," but the truth is so much more important than your feelings.  And the truth is that dinner is so much more than just the third meal of the day.

Each meal is the marriage of what you eat and when you eat, relative to when you start your day.  Breakfast must occur shortly upon waking up, even if you wake up at noon or later, and must consist of things like eggs, cereal, biscuits, pancakes, waffles, etc.  Lunch should take place a few hours later, in the middle of your day, with soup, a sandwich, a bagel, a salad, chips, etc.  Dinner is, granted, the third and typically last meal of the day, but it must involve the consumption of some entreé, like steak, burger, pasta, pizza, or even salad if it's hearty enough, with a side dish or a dessert (I'm a little more flexible with defining "side dish"; despite being very different in taste and texture, both corn and chili qualify as side dishes, since neither really fits in any other food category.  Dessert is fairly self-explanatory: something sweet after a meal).

I hate to have to get all Etiquette Nazi on your ass, but any derivation from these norms requires you to relinquish your right to say you eat three square meals a day.  Waking up and eating pasta with breadsticks does not count as breakfast.  Eating an omelet at midday if you woke up at 7 a.m. does not count as lunch.  A peanut butter and jelly sandwich after having a legitimate breakfast and lunch does not count as dinner.

An important fourth element here is the snack.  A snack can be almost anything, as long as it doesn't already fit into breakfast, lunch, dinner, or side dish, and any combination of snacks, so long as there is ample time in between each individual snack, does not qualify as a meal simply by virtue of the amount of food being consumed.  For example, if one eats a bag of popcorn at 8 p.m. and then some grapes at 10 p.m., that's two separate snacks, not dinner split into two parts.  Desserts are snacks if they do not follow a meal and instead stand alone.

This debate started because my job does not have me working regular hours every day.  Sometimes, I work in the afternoon and evening.  Sometimes, I work in the morning.  Try as I might, I cannot get into a regular routine of eating three meals, as I have defined them.  So I take what I can get when I can get it, and because of that sporadic eating, I most often have to skip dinner.  Certain other individuals do not buy that claim, believing instead that it's all about the absolute time you eat, not the relative time, and that what you eat matters little.  To them, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at 7 p.m. is dinner simply because I am eating it at 7 p.m.  Such unrefined logic makes me frown with lost hope.

Now that I've codified what has always seemed to me to be a set of self-evident truths, I shall allow you, dear reader, to attempt to thwart me with counterexamples.  If, as I expect, you cannot thwart me, then feel free to share your own rigid or cavalier definitions of meals.