I think something may have been lost in translation here. Meal scenes are one of the most frequent set pieces in the Homeric epics, often described in loving detail from the slaughtering of animals to the cooking of their meat to the award of a portion of the food to each person present. These are communal and highly ritualised events that form an important activity for both male and female characters in both poems. They are, unquestionably, meals as a thing that people set aside time to do together, during which they would not be doing anything else.

If the idea of a meal as a discrete activity was ever really invented, it would have happened thousands of years before the composition of the Homeric epics. At a very basic level, any kind of food that requires preparation (including meat, whether from hunted or domesticated animals) cannot be eaten casually. Early Archaic Greece was an agricultural society and its main staple food was barley bread, as it had been for over a millennium. Like meat, this is not a type of food you can individually gather and eat on the go. The need to grind the grains, work them into a paste or dough, and bake that mixture into bread, porridge, or cakes - the need to process food in this way before it could be eaten makes the meal into a distinct part of the day. Once your diet consists of cooked foods, you need to take time to cook it, and this will almost inevitably transform eating into a communal and social activity that takes up a significant part of the day.

This is why meals are such an important part of the Homeric world: preparing and eating food is something that tied groups of people together because of their common needs. Sacrifices to the gods would result in a feast on the meat of the sacrificial animals. Different groups who were working together, like sailors or women washing clothes, would take time out to prepare their barley bread and wine, and eat together. Afterwards they might engage in further communal activities like singing, dancing, storytelling or ballgames. We also have archaeological evidence to show that communal feasts were essential to social cohesion in this period; we often find caches of animal bones discarded at sanctuaries and grave sites, showing that people ate elaborate meals together to praise the gods and mourn the dead.

My best guess as to what Jubber meant by the claim that the epics predate "the invention of mealtimes" is that characters in Homer seem to organise their meals pretty much whenever it suits them. They did not follow our customary pattern of having 3 meals at more or less fixed times throughout the day. Homeric Greeks seem to follow the general Ancient Greek habit of eating one meal per day (and not eating anything for the rest of the day); but this meal sometimes happens shortly after dawn, sometimes in the middle of the day, and sometimes in the evening. In other words, there does not seem to be a particular time at which they expected to have a meal. There was no distinction between what we might call breakfast, lunch, dinner or supper. It was clearly taken for granted that people would not be picky about when they ate, since it was never certain at which time they would have their one meal on a given day.

Which time was the opportune time to organise a meal was clearly determined by circumstance, and this is where the diversity of human activity in the epics is hugely helpful. We can see that wealthy men were accustomed to eating their meal in the evening, inviting guests to their homes for a night of food and drink. But people at work - farmers, warriors, traders, washing-women - would have their meal when they could. Sailors needed an opportunity in the form of a place to beach their ships and draw fresh water. People working out of doors might take the opportunity of a lull in their work, like the washing-women who eat while the clothes they have cleaned are drying in the sun. Those about to embark on some great venture would sacrifice to the gods when they departed, and eat then.

In short, the claim that mealtimes hadn't been invented is very misleading. We are thousands of years along from the introduction of agriculture, which precludes intermittent grazing as a way to feed, but even hunter-gatherers probably would have had communal meals rather than the occasional bite. Partly this is because meals serve very important religious and social functions as well as purely physiological ones. But in any case, while the Greeks of Homer's day certainly had meals, their food clocks were indeed very different, and irregular compared to ours.