If you want to see how inflated our portion sizes have become, don’t go to the supermarket — head to an antique shop. You spot a tiny goblet clearly designed for a doll, only to be told it is a “wine glass”. What look like side plates turn out to be dinner plates. The real side plates resemble saucers.
Back in a modern kitchen, you suddenly notice how vast everything is — 28 centimetres has become a normal diameter for a dinner plate, which in the 1950s would have been 25 centimetres. Just because we are eating off these great expanses of china does not of course mean that we have to serve ourselves bigger portions. But as it happens, we usually do.
Brian Wansink is a psychologist (author of “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think”) who has done numerous experiments to prove what you would hope common sense might already tell us: that oversized tableware makes us consume bigger portions.
A large ice-cream scoop makes you take more ice-cream; a short, squat glass makes you pour more juice. Because it doesn’t look like much, we still feel we are consuming roughly the same amount. Wansink calls this the size-contrast illusion.
The “real danger of these kitchen traps”, writes Wansink, is that “almost every single person in the world believes they’re immune to them”.
In fact, it seems that the only people who are immune to big portions are tiny children. Up until the age of three or four, children have an enviable ability to stop eating when they are full.
After that age, this self-regulation of hunger is lost, and sometimes never relearnt. This is a cross-cultural phenomenon, from London to Beijing. One study from the US found that when three-year-olds were served small, medium and large portions of macaroni cheese, they always ate roughly the same amount. By contrast, five-year-olds ate a lot more when the portion of macaroni cheese was oversized.
In a world where food is ever-present, many of us have become like Alice in Wonderland, controlled by cakes that say Eat Me and bottles that say Drink Me. As the nutritionist Marion Nestle remarked 10 years ago in her book, “What to Eat”: “It is human nature to eat when presented with food, and to eat more when presented with more food.”
The trouble is that we are pushed more food, more often, every day. In 2013, the British Heart Foundation published a report called “Portion Distortion” on how portion sizes in Britain have changed since 1993. Back then, the average American-style muffin weighed 85 grams, whereas 20 years later it was not uncommon to find muffins weighing 130 grams.
Ready meals have also ballooned in size, with chicken pies expanding by 49 per cent and the average shepherd’s pie nearly doubling in size since 1993 (from 210 grams to 400 grams). To overeat in such an environment may be less about lacking willpower than being set in your ways.
Food psychologists talk about “unit bias” meaning that we are inclined to think that a portion equals one of something, no matter what the size. Even when it’s the 2,000-calorie single slice of pizza that nutritionists managed to buy in New York City: a whole day’s worth of calories in a single snack.
But while portions in cafés and restaurants are often now gargantuan, the recommended portions on food packets may be unrealistically small. For most breakfast cereals, the “serving size” across the EU is 30 grams. In a Kellogg’s Variety pack, the Corn Flakes are just 17 grams. To my 16-year-old son, this is hardly more than a mouthful (admittedly, he is 6ft 11in).
A couple of years ago, I interviewed a spokesperson for Kellogg’s, who said that these tiny recommended sizes are aimed at children but admitted that adults do “eat a bit more”.
They certainly do. A study in 2013 found that when 140 British adults in Southend and Birmingham were asked to pour out a normal bowl of cornflakes, 88 per cent of participants took more than 30 grams. The average was 44 grams.
Our confusion over portions in Britain is linked to the fact that we have lost so many of our basic instincts about cooking. When the Department of Health tells us that the ideal portion of broccoli is “two spears” whereas for cauliflower it is “eight florets”, it doesn’t bear much relation to ordinary meals.
By contrast, a 2010 survey of nearly 1,500 elderly South Koreans found that there was still a remarkable level of convergence over how much to eat of particular foods, because of traditional cuisine.
Almost all the Koreans in the survey agreed that a portion of polished white rice was 75 grams; sweet potato was 120 grams; spinach was a hefty 40 grams, and roasted white sesame seeds was 1 gram.
Without this kind of shared knowledge to guide us, we remain at the mercy of the food industry. In a state of overabundance, food companies have two possible strategies. One is to sell us smaller portions at higher prices — this January, Unilever announced that it was cutting the size of ice-creams such as Magnum and Cornetto by up to a third (though, needless to say, it did not bring the prices down by the same margin).
The other, more universal, approach is to attempt to sell us more food. In 1988, you could only buy a Cadbury’s milk chocolate bar in a single size: 54 grams. Now, you can buy it as 49 grams, 110 grams, 200 grams and 360 grams. Compared with the truly colossal 360-gram bar, the still-massive 110 grams looks almost modest.
Our problem with portions is partly this: no one likes the concept of “less”. We are conditioned from childhood onwards to yearn for the overflowing glass and the laden table. An easy way to address this at home is simply to use smaller tableware.
Often at the end of a meal, I am not really hungry but yearn for something sweet. I find that if I get a tiny dipping bowl and pile it high with whatever I desire — dense chocolate brownies, sticky halva — I feel satisfied, even with a tiny portion. When I first tried this, it felt silly. Could I really be fooled by a plate? Yes. I could. And so could you.
Last year, researchers at Cambridge University led by Theresa Marteau, director of the behaviour and health research unit, conducted an experiment in a local Cambridge pub called The Pint Shop.
The researchers found that when larger glassware was used (370 millilitres compared with 300 millilitres), sales of a standard 175 millilitres measure of wine went up by 9 per cent. Marteau, whose research focuses on how people can be encouraged to adopt healthier behaviours, noted that the larger glasses made people feel they were drinking less, and so they gulped the wine faster.
Marteau’s hope is that government will look at studies such as this and adopt policies to reduce the availability of large portions. The short-term effect of the study has been rather different, however. Having seen the impact on sales, The Pint Shop is now permanently serving its wine in larger glasses.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
