Four graphic examples of portion distortion – you’ll be shocked! (glass, steak)
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I saw a comparison of portion sizes from the 19040-50s and today. If someone finds it, please post.
Everything is bigger now and we haven't learned to assess with our eye & satiation, we've learned to accept units of food as they are presented to us.
Most old cookbooks seem to be able to produce miraculous amounts of cookies and biscuits from a single recipe, for example, so 'one cookie' has changed but our language and concepts about food have not.
like others have said, i wish they would start to serve food in it's actual 1 person serving size (when eating out) and lower the price. we would all be better off.
restaurants would benefit just as much. they would need to buy smaller quantities of supplies so they wouldn't be losing money.
Yes, they would lose money. A typical restaurant meal, only about 20-30% of the menu price represents the actual cost of the food that is served. The rest is overhead. It costs hundreds of dollars a day just to open a modest restaurant in the morning and turn on the lights.
A restaurant with a reputation for large servings will draw in a lot more customers, who in turn will pay the cost of the overhead and reduce the per-customer cost of doing business. That volume is why all-you-can-eat buffets can let you out the door for only seven bucks.
Let's say you have a stupendous hungry-man breakfast. Six eggs cost 60 cents, a pound of hash browns for 40 cents, a half pound of sausage for a dollar. Everything else they have to pay anyway (labor, utilities, mortgage, insurance, etc), whether you walk in or drive on by. Two bucks for a lot more than most truckers can eat. But they charge more than that for one boiled egg and a slice of toast, because you can't even pay the insurance if you only ring up two bucks per customer. They'll charge 8.95 for that breakfast, and 6.95 is their overhead.
^^^ maybe, but those servings were big enough for people at that time, no one was hungry and lots of people were slimmer and more active.
I think it has MUCH more to do with the fact that fewer people are engaged in manual labor as primary employment than the past containing some alternate reality where people ate eleven potato chips or a third of a slice of bread, or a tablespoonful of mashed potatoes, or a sliver of pie, or just a bite of a cookie and said, "Boy, that was a satisfying serving."
My grandmother was a farm wife from the 1930s through 1990s. Her hearty meals did not increase in serving size over the years...they were always large portions meant to nourish people whose jobs incorporated a great deal of physical activity. Even when I think of her desserts...her Amish sugar cookies, for instance...they WERE, admittedly, much smaller than the standard bakery cookie today... more the size of a Chips Ahoy than the size of a teacup saucer, for instance. But, nobody was eating just one, either...more like three or four, so it was kind of a wash. The main issue is that much more physical activity was embedded into many people's workdays, not that they ate tiny portions back in the day. Nobody in my family evidenced anything resembling obesity until we stopped farming. Their diets didn't change, but their level of physical activity did when they stopped working as physically demanding of jobs. When you aren't physically exerting yourself as part of your workday, you can't eat like you did when that WAS the case.
I've always found it weird to buy, say, just 1 side of garlic fries or 1 salad as my entire meal at some diner when that's all it'll take to keep me full.
I can't imagine that, in the time since potato chips were invented, anybody has EVER eaten a serving size of 11 chips.
LOL. But seriously, the serving sizes, how and why they're derived, and the variations in measurement are rather ridiculous, aren't they?
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Originally Posted by elnina
maybe, but those servings were big enough for people at that time
When was a half-cup of cereal ever enough?
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Originally Posted by TabulaRasa
I think it has MUCH more to do with the fact that fewer people are engaged in manual labor as primary employment than the past containing some alternate reality where people ate eleven potato chips or a third of a slice of bread, or a tablespoonful of mashed potatoes, or a sliver of pie, or just a bite of a cookie and said, "Boy, that was a satisfying serving."
Good point. People ate huge meals, and they snacked.
LOL. But seriously, the serving sizes, how and why they're derived, and the variations in measurement are rather ridiculous, aren't they?
Serving sizes are set up by the manufactures. Smaller sizes mean less calories/fat/sugar etc. on the label. Marketing idea...
In other countries serving size is always the same e.g. 100g - so easy to understand and compare. Here the serving sizes varies for the same product from one manufacturer to another. It's very hard to compare, because you not only need to look at the nutrition values, but also compare the serving sizes.
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When was a half-cup of cereal ever enough?
“If you put on a meaningful portion size, it would scare a lot of people,” said Barry Popkin, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina. “They would see, ‘I’m going to get 300 calories from that, or 500 calories.’ ” F.D.A. Weighs Update to Standard Serving Sizes - NYTimes.com
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Good point. People ate huge meals, and they snacked.
Yes, but at that time there was less processed food, people ate more at home, and they generally moved more around.
Now people are driving, and sitting longer hours...
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