Hard as it is to believe, a claim has oozed out of the leftist brain pan that may be more embarrassingly idiotic than the claim that Islamic fanatics needs jobs and midnight basketball to extinguish the burning desire to chop off heads.

Mother Jones, a conveyor belt for crackpot leftist theories, says eating three meals a day is racist. Here’s the headline: “Why You Should Stop Eating Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner: Dogmatic adherence to mealtimes is anti-science, racist, and might actually be making you sick.”

How is eating three times a day racist? A young leftist lady explains:

Historian Abigail Carroll, author of the book Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal, explained to me that the the thrice-daily eating schedule goes back at least as far as the Middle Ages in Europe. When European settlers got to America, they also imported their meal habits: a light meal — maybe cold mush and radishes — in the morning, a heavier, cooked one midday, and a third meal similar to the first one later in the day. They observed that the eating schedule of the native tribes was less rigid—the volume and timing of their eating varied with the seasons. Sometimes, when food was scarce, they fasted. The Europeans took this as “evidence that natives were uncivilized,” Carroll explained to me in an email. “Civilized people ate properly and boundaried their eating, thus differentiating themselves from the animal kingdom, where grazing is the norm.” (So fascinated were Europeans with tribes’ eating patterns, notes Carroll, that they actually watched Native Americans eat “as a form of entertainment.”)

The racism, apparently, was that the pale faces watched the Redskins eat, presumably to ridicule them, then concluded that said Redskins were “uncivilized.”

For one thing, the Indians were uncivilized, and no one needed to watch them eat to figure that out. Anyone vaguely familiar with Meso-Americans or the Indian tribes of early America knows this. Second, I’d be interested to know whether Europeans really “watched Native Americans eat ‘as a form of entertainment.’”

As Newsbusters’ Tom Bluner wrote, “Really, Abigail? People just stood around in presumably large groups and watched others eat? Excuse the skepticism, but I’d like to see voluminous, contemporaneous proof of this. In other words, one or two diary entries won’t do, because we’re talking about ‘entertainment’ here, as in something that would be a rather routine and frequently occurring ritual of amusement.”

Perhaps Bluner is wrong, but given that the Native Americans may well have wound up eating the Europeans had they availed themselves of such entertainment, it does sound like bunk. But even if it is isn’t, how did Mother Jones conclude that eating three squares a day is “racist?”

You are thus informed. Eating a dish of Cheerios at dawn, a bologna sandwich and pickle at noon, and roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy at dusk constitutes the mortal sin of race hatred.

Unsurprisingly, the comments after the piece are unsparing in serving up the ridicule this stupid story so richly deserves.