Column:

Breakfast for dinner perfect solution

By Lindsay Eanet

Published Jan. 23, 2009

Brinner (n.) -- a meal that consists of having breakfast food for dinner or otherwise in the evening.

When you think about it, brinner is the perfect meal, because it's rare that people are upset or angry while eating it. Maybe it's because I live in a college town and, as college students do, I tend to think of places like Waffle House and the International House of Pancakes as being the perfect ending to an evening of drunken lechery. Or maybe it's because it awakens our inner child, hearkening back to the days when we begged our parents to make us waffles for dinner, the delight that lingers still of doing something unconventional in eating atypical dinner fare. Or maybe it's just the food itself: after brinner, the consumer is overcome with a feeling of woozy contentment and satisfaction -- a state in which it is rather hard to be mean or aggressive.

The typical brinner eatery is also generally a place of unity and friendship. If it's not the neighborhood diner where everybody knows your name, then it's the high-traffic Waffle House where new friends are made via ridiculous, oft-intoxicated encounters.

My favorite example of the latter occurred last April, when I found myself in a crowded Waffle House in southwest Missouri at around 2 a.m. One of the other patrons played Britney Spears' "...Baby One More Time" on the jukebox, and the entire restaurant -- literally, every single person -- burst into song. If that doesn't connote Waffle House-inspired unity, I don't know what does.

The late-night brinner establishment is, above all things, the great equalizer. It is -- and I apologize for using an election cliché -- "real America" defined because it permeates demographic. Anywhere you go -- from St. Louis to Honolulu, Eugene, Ore. to southern Mississippi -- there is a diner, chain or otherwise, where all people, regardless of background, can come together, a melting pot smothered in gravy and served with hash browns on the side.

With that in mind, I want to start the brinner revolution. I believe the brinner establishments of America, nay, the world, can become the stages for the next movement towards world peace. Since President Barack Obama and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad probably won't be sitting down for a syrup-soaked brinner any time soon, if this is to be implemented as a strategy, it would have to begin with us. So start small. Invite some friends, acquaintances or those random kids from your dorm who you've always wanted to talk to but haven't quite gotten up the nerve to associate yourself with them for brinner, either at a brinner establishment like Waffle House or, even better (and likely easier on the wallet -- we're in a recession, y'all!), one that you prepared yourself. The good vibes they will feel from the tasty, waffley goodness congealing in their stomachs will radiate into happy thoughts, which will turn into positive actions.

This probably comes off as a naïve or just overtly ridiculous theory and it's obvious that Waffle House will not solve every global conflict. But there's no proof that brinner is not an effective path to world peace. I mean, we've tried everything in the sphere of conventional wisdom, and everything in the sphere of the completely unfeasible (bed-ins, levitating the Pentagon, etc.). So maybe the next step is to combine the whimsical with the tangible when looking at how we improve the world. Peace through pancakes, y'all. Think about it.