Their choices are rat, mouse, or nothing, but they do have choices, and I think non-fictional characters would typically have more palatable choices about what to have for dinner, when using this age-old common phrase, 230 years ago.
Edit: 1794 was in the middle of the French Revolution, and in the decades leading up, the peasantry famously had the choice of no bread or no cake. This bewildering choice is why they were misérable.
But it was less of a "choice". You could choose between using this or that now vs tomorrow, pulling something from the root cellar, etc, but it was a clear optimization problem even if some of the specifics were subjective or speculative.. No "I don't feel like eating chicken tendies" bullshit.
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So I did a chronological search for "what's for dinner", here it is in a poem from 1794: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_pindarian...
Their choices are rat, mouse, or nothing, but they do have choices, and I think non-fictional characters would typically have more palatable choices about what to have for dinner, when using this age-old common phrase, 230 years ago.
Edit: 1794 was in the middle of the French Revolution, and in the decades leading up, the peasantry famously had the choice of no bread or no cake. This bewildering choice is why they were misérable.
But it was less of a "choice". You could choose between using this or that now vs tomorrow, pulling something from the root cellar, etc, but it was a clear optimization problem even if some of the specifics were subjective or speculative.. No "I don't feel like eating chicken tendies" bullshit.