Jeremiah Brown, a contestant on the latest season of “Love Island USA,” was not a big breakfast guy when he stepped into the expansive and luminous Barbie dream house villa last month.
“I’m not gonna lie,” he said. “I never made pancakes for myself.”
“Islanders” on the Peacock dating show prepare only one meal for themselves: breakfast. So on the cast’s second day in Fiji, Taylor Williams, another Islander and “a great cook,” according to Mr. Brown, gave him some pancake pointers. It was a lesson that would lay the groundwork for one of the silliest storylines of Season 7, which concludes Sunday. And, in a way, it foreshadowed the end of Mr. Brown’s 16-day stint in the villa.
Mr. Brown, who was coupled with Huda Mustafa, rushes from the outdoor kitchen to the women’s dressing room to deliver a stack of pancakes. “No protein?” she mumbles. She cuts into them to find they’re raw in the middle, then seeks out Mr. Williams, the pancake maestro, to remedy the matter.
Pancake-gate ensues. The breakfast, the couple would soon realize, was much like their relationship: undercooked and without much substance.
On “Love Island USA,” breakfast is a meal, a metaphor and a powerful equalizer.
There is a primal hum that scores the ritual, which is performed almost exclusively by the men to court, curry favor with or lay claim to their female counterparts. Sequestered in their oceanfront villa and managed by producers, contestants have few romantic gestures at their disposal as they aim to pair up or get dumped from the island.
“Every guy’s making a full course meal for the girl they like,” said Mr. Brown, 25. “So if you don’t do it, then you don’t like her and you’re cooked.”
This season, for instance, one contestant repeatedly swipes coffee made for his partner by a hopeful suitor and replaces it. The same contestant, threatened by the craftsmanship of another competitor’s “C” shaped pancakes, stops to cut a “C” into his own. And when men bring breakfasts to multiple women, a common occurrence, the proof of their passions lie in the pancake.
“This morning he gave her two pancakes and gave me one, gave her a flower and gave me none,” says Ms. Mustafa about an Islander she expresses interest in following Mr. Brown’s dumping.
Breakfast’s role in the villa has materially evolved since the show debuted in the United Kingdom a decade ago. Plates of questionably constructed avocado toast and mugs of peppermint tea once functioned primarily as a signpost of a new day on the island, occasionally affording more enterprising contestants the opportunity to woo their partner.
But in the stateside spinoff, which films and airs nearly every day for six weeks, pancakes and eggs and bacon have become characters unto themselves. They move relationships forward, or, in Mr. Brown’s case, derail them outright.
If last season’s breakout star was the quippy Leah Kateb, this season’s breakout star is, without question, breakfast.
On a given day, the villa goes through about 40 eggs (1,700 a season) and roughly 12 avocados (500 a season), according to a production spokesman. The kitchen’s fridge is fully restocked three times a day with breakfast staples like fruit, cheese, granola, coffee and, of course, pancake mix.
Perhaps taking note from earlier seasons, Mr. Brown expected to start off with avocado toast and ramp up to more elaborate meals as his connections progressed. But on Day 1, his competitors hit the kitchen with gusto.
“You want to make them feel special in the morning,” Mr. Brown said. “That’s the first thing they’re seeing, the first thing they’re eating after a tough night of sleep.” (Islanders sleep together in one big room.)
This season’s contestants appear the most comfortable in the kitchen yet. There have been omelets. There have been crepes. There has been a makeshift date, orchestrated by one particularly resourceful contestant, inexplicably called “hibachi breakfast.” (Because he cooks in front of her?)
“It’s really a representation of acts of service,” said Lindsey Weber, a writer and a co-host of the pop-culture podcast “Who? Weekly.” “It’s not about whether the breakfast is good or bad. It is just about making breakfast and showing your intentions for people.”
In older seasons of “Love Island U.K.,” the breakfast gallantry would come once contestants neared exclusivity in their couple, said Rebecca Jennings, a features writer at New York Magazine and the author of “Be the Bombshell: What Love Island Teaches Us About Dating.” She attributed the All-Star Special shift to the ballooning popularity of “Love Island USA” and viewers-turned-Islanders understanding the “implicit meaning of breakfast” on the show.
“I think that they’re kind of studying the game and executing it in a way that will make them look better on camera,” she said.
Production has played up the meal, too. Earlier this season you could buy a batter bowl with a lid and a floating spatula on the Love Island app, alongside cowboy hats and the stringiest bikinis.
Ultimately, breakfast leads to good banter, Ms. Weber said. “Here’s how I like my coffee. You have to remember that. You’ve to remember what I prefer. And it creates actually a sweetness in their relationships that I think sometimes the show does lack.”
For all of the gendered tropes that define dating shows, there’s an endearing subversiveness to the “Love Island USA” men clattering around the kitchen, futzing with the espresso maker and whipping up stacks of pancakes as the women get ready for, well, work.
“Even if the girls wanted to make breakfast for themselves, it kind of goes against the rules of the dynamic of the show,” Ms. Weber said.
One Reddit user even described the show as setting unrealistic expectations. “How upset are you after watching LI USA that your man at home doesn’t make you breakfast every morning?”
Whether scrambled eggs are a daily given depends on your relationship, of course. But, at this stage of their relationships, would Islanders be making each other diner-style spreads “on the outside?”
“Y’all wouldn’t even stay over at each other’s house if you were in the real world,” Ms. Jennings said. “You wouldn’t even have breakfast together.”
Tanya Sichynsky is an editor for the Food and Cooking sections of The Times and the author of The Veggie, a weekly vegetarian newsletter.
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