Before the Industrial Revolution, people ate when they were hungry. Our insistence on meals at fixed times is a modern effect of accurate watchmaking and the introduction of work shifts.
That seems... less than obvious to me. One could as easily say that modern food-preservation technology (refrigeration, sealed containers, chemical preservatives) enabled snacking, and that preindustrial people would have had a stronger incentive to eat preplanned meals. That's a just-so story, granted, but most of the preindustrial cooking methods I'm familiar with would have taken hours and produced food for many people: not exactly conducive to eating individually as a response to hunger.
Of course, eating at precisely 7:00 or whatever is enabled by mo...
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