The Dinner Conspiracy?

So a coworker raised an interesting point today (he's one of those coworkers who's always got an interesting point to raise). "Why do we need dinner?" He asked. "I don't know," I responded, "Because we're hungry around that time of night?" And he said, "But why can't we just have a big late lunch and only eat two meals a day? Don't you think maybe you've just been conditioned to be hungry at night because you're used to eating dinner?"

I didn't have an answer to that one. In my head I was thinking, but, it's dinner...it just is. And it's good. And aren't you not supposed to skip meals? I wasn't convinced.

But he continued to argue his point. "Isn't dinner just a social construct? I bet it's not totally natural for human beings to want to eat dinner."

"So why do we do it?" I asked.

And here's where he really got me. "So people can make money," he said. Wow. A conspiracy theorist to out-theorize even me? If you know me, you know I love conspiracies. But suddenly I found myself torn between my devotion to military-industrial paranoia, and my love for dinner. And the whole ordeal made me realize, sometimes it's healthy to question authority. But not always.