Meal sizes increasing… for the last thousand years?
This is why I love my alma mater. From Cornell’s PR wing:
The size of food portions and plates in more than four dozen depictions of the Last Supper — painted over the past 1,000 years — have gradually gotten bigger and bigger, according to a Cornell study published in The International Journal of Obesity (April, online March 23), a peer-reviewed publication.
The study found that the size of the entrées in paintings of the Last Supper, which according to the New Testament occurred during a Passover evening, has progressively grown 69 percent; plate size has increased 66 percent and bread size by about 23 percent, over the past millennium.
The author, Brian Wansink, is the author of the recent book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, which gets very high marks by reviewers at Amazon. Not to be confused with David Kessler’s The End of Overeating, which is the one with the yummy-looking carrot cake on the cover.