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Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

As an adult, I would have a hard time eating olives for breakfast--and I like them. You know...in salads, on pizza, etc. I cannot fathom a child eating a bowl-full for breakfast. Especially when the bowls of feta-esque cheese and sliced tomatoes are already sort-of daunting.

I'll make a wild guess and say that kids around the world actually eat the equivalent of pop tarts (if they have money) or oatmeal (if they don't).

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> I cannot fathom a child eating a bowl-full for breakfast.

They don't do that. The page doesn't make it wonderfully clear, but some of these breakfasts are DIY buffet affairs where of some dishes only a little is used and the rest is put back.

From the Netherlands, when I was young I didn't know many kids who were allowed refined sugar/equivalent for breakfast and now I don't know many parents allowing their kids refined sugar for breakfast. Or at all actually unless at special occasions or in very low quantities. Pop tarts (or equivalent) for breakfast sounds absolutely horrible to be honest. Olives on the other hand...

I grew up on brown bread with cheese for breakfast as did my friends; we are all almost 2 meters tall; is it a coincidence? :)

I'm British and as far as I could see, when visiting in the 80's my very middle class dutch cousins in Eindhoven and Amersfoort practically lived on Chocoladepasta and Hagelslag sandwiches.

http://stuffdutchpeoplelike.com/2011/03/06/hagelslag/

Uh ... So all the talk about hagelslag is just nonsense? I haven't tasted it, but just from the looks of it I'd say it probably contains quite a lot of refined sugar. And it seems to be very popular with kids (as the article says).

Disclaimer: I'm from Sweden, but I've been to the Netherlands quite a lot.

Nope, I know a lot of kids from school who eat that stuff like crazy. Not my hippy mom though haha. But it wasn't at all on the list of 'things other kids have that I wan't but can't get', I still don't like it to this day. It's basically bread with sugar, which is pretty ridiculous considering the bread itself contains plenty of sugar.

I really wish we'd be eating more warm and more green in the morning. Fruits are great, but they're also sugar bombs. So when I see a tiny kid eat a kiwi (sugar bomb), a glass of pure orange juice (two oranges full of sugar-juice), bread (carbohydrate-bomb that gets turned into sugar) with jam (full of sugar, made of fruits) and milk with chocolate cereal (more sugar!) I'd be surprised if that kid couldn't concentrate in class. For one, that's the volume of food I might eat in the morning (at 80kg), but with much less sugar.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-sugar, I eat fruits and jams and bread every day. But some of these breakfasts seem completely unbalanced.

Hope to see more oatmeal like the Icelander kid!

Funny to see kids in Brazil drink coffee. Reminds me of having coffee as a kid (cafe late late late though, more milk than coffee) in Morocco when I was young.

No :) I said I was not allowed, nor were most of my friends nor are most kids of my friends now. Just on special occasions and then the darkest kind (pure hagelslag). The about being the tallest (we are) was a joke; that works (apparently) fine with Hagelslag as well.

I've been eating bread with butter and chocolate sprinkles and a glass of milk for over thirty years. When I was in school in the 1980s/1990s almost everyone would regularly eat bread with sprinkles.

I looked up the ingredients of the package with sprinkles in my fridge and per 100g, 66g are sugars. I just made one serving (two slices of buttered bread sandwiched with one layer of chocolate sprinkles) and the sprinkles weigh about 23g. So, for me, per day, that'd be about 50g of sprinkles, or 33g of sugar.

I've been in most of those countries (long enough to know about their breakfasts) and can attest these are very accurate. But stepping back a bit, it's not too surprising a somewhat in-depth piece of investigative journalism on the new york times is more accurate than someone on the internet's ... "wild guess".

From my experience, these are accurate. In many countries, the morning meal does not differ much from the other meals of the day, and will consist of things that Americans find quite strange.

olives, tomato and feta makes a very nice breakfast. As does Greek yoghurt and honey. Oats do not grow in Greece, so probably cost more - oatmeal is a Scottish/northern countries thing, not really very universal. And poptarts, yuk.

When I was a kid in Scotland my favourite breakfast was what we called rollies (AKA butteries or Aberdeen rolls) - a particular treat was having them served with scrambled egg inside.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttery_%28bread%29

Why? The strong taste? Well my sister used to be absolutely obsessed with olives when she was very very young. I never understood it myself, I didn't like them as a kid. I tried them again in adulthood and loved them. I could easily eat a bowl of olives. In fact I have.

I had pop tarts when I was 6 years old and went on a trip to the USA with my family. It was horribly sweet and not at all delicious. On the other hand, peanut butter was an enjoyable discovery.

Pop tarts for breakfast? That’s insane :D And I would think people with money would generally give their kids a healthier breakfast than so.

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