Portion sizes in The Last Supper (up by 69%)

[JoshT]

For all of you who are interested in both weight loss and history (or religion), I found this article to be pretty interesting. Except:

Wansink teamed up with his brother Craig Wansink, a religious studies professor at Virginia Wesleyan College, to look at how portion sizes have changed over time by examining the food depicted in 52 of the most famous paintings of the scene from the Last Supper.

...

From the 52 paintings, which date between 1000 and 2000 A.D., the sizes of loaves of bread, main dishes and plates were calculated with the aid of a computer program that could scan the items and rotate them in a way that allowed them to be measured. To account for different proportions in paintings, the sizes of the food were compared to the sizes of the human heads in the paintings.

The researchers' analysis showed that portion sizes of main courses (usually eel, lamb and pork) depicted in the paintings grew by 69 percent over time, while plate size grew by 66 percent and bread size grew by 23 percent.

The article is here:
http://www.livescience.com/culture/larg ... 00323.html

[reinhard]

Thanks for the post.

As a humanities nerd with a dayjob in science, I got a huge kick out of it.

I do suspect the methodology might be a little flawed, however...

A more obvious explanation for the increasing portion sizes might simply be increasing artistic realism. From what I understand, back in the middle ages, artists painted the most important things bigger. "Eel, lamb and pork" can't really compete with Jesus Christ and the Apostles in terms of importance. But since the renaissance at least, artists have tended to be more scientific about perspective and proportion.

Reinhard

[kccc]

Good point, Reinhard.

I'd also like to see a line graph of the changes (it may be there - I didn't go to the full article)... would be interesting to see how much of that increase happened in the last 50 years.

[TunaFishKid]

"Eel, lamb and pork" can't really compete with Jesus Christ and the Apostles...

I must be in a silly mood today...that sentence really cracked me up.

[reinhard]

What's are they doing eating pork, anyway? And "bread" -- it was passover!

From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matzo

According to Western Christian belief, matzo was the bread used by Jesus in the Last Supper as there he was celebrating Passover; Communion wafers used by Roman Catholics for the Eucharist are flat

Reinhard

[ShannahR]

Not to get too "religiony" but I don't believe eel is kosher either. I guess we have to chalk it up to artisic license.