As someone who does not eat breakfast, I imagine it's to avoid the kind of response I get when I tell my host I don't eat breakfast:

"Oh, are you sure? It's no trouble? It's good for you! Breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Why not just eat breakfast with us?" etc. etc.

I can empathize with that, since I also have some traits that raise similar responses, which I'd rather avoid.

But I'd better word my request as "please don't question my choices" instead of going into that much detail about them, which is precisely what I'd like to avoid in the first place.

Makes him hungry for breakfast.

He doesn't drink coffee. If I didn't drink coffee I'd be cranky in the mornings too.

He does drink tea, though, which is also a pretty good caffeine-delivery mechanism.

I actually had breakfast with him at a conference in Havana in 2007, so I was a little surprised to see this in his rider. Another reader posted that it's new since 2008, so maybe he had some sort of breakfast-related disaster at some point in '07-'08... or maybe having to spend an entire breakfast lecturing me about why Linux should always be called GNU/Linux put him off the meal for good.

I don't know why, but it's a new one since 2008 (I hosted a RMS talk then and still have the rider).