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A matter of good taste

When it comes to food, it's not size that counts
food_glenda1

I sliced a peach the size of a softball for lunch today. Some of the blueberries sitting in a bowl nearby looked like concord grapes.

Last week we brought home organic strawberries as big as what used to be apricots, which are now as big as peaches. Peaches of bygone days, to be clear.

Steaks an inch-and-a-quarter thick and bigger than a dinner platter caught our eye in a SuperStore not long ago — for all the wrong reasons — as did huge honkin' trays of ground beef maybe 16 inches long and 10 wide. These will undoubtedly serve an amazingly few people, accompanied by oversized portions to match: servings of salad so big they'll need their own bowls; maybe a cob of corn or two; baked potatoes big enough for two people, heaped with sour cream and bacon bits in case the satisfaction levels aren't adequate.

What I've feared for years has now been proven to be empirically true. According to the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, a study in Denmark shows how much more those of us lucky enough to live in the Western world have been eating over time.

Yes, we've known portions have gotten larger over the past 20 years or so, but what was being analyzed was commercial food products. Most nutritionists and research scientists, including the ones who did the Danish study, peg servings not prepared at home at about 20 per cent larger.

We have greater exceptions: An average soda pop 20 years ago was only 6.5 ounces and contained 85 calories; today it's more than tripled, to 20 ounces and 250 calories. Twenty years ago, your basic serving of French fries logged in about 2.4 ounces and 210 calories. Today, it's almost seven ounces, on average, and 610 calories.

But it was the longer view and what we cook at home that interested the Danes. So they analyzed recipes in 13 editions, spanning 1909 to 2009, of the famous and popular Danish cookbook, Food.

The results showed that the mean portion size of the recipes, measured in calories over the 100 years, increased by 21 per cent. When it comes to a homemade meal made of servings from those recipes, the mean portion size in calories increased by a whopping 77 per cent. For the meat serving, calories increased by 27 per cent; sauce by 47 per cent. For veggies it was 37 per cent and for those glorious carbs we can't seem to get enough of, the increase in mean portion size in calories was a staggering 148 per cent.

Where's it going to end? And besides the crazy change in caloric intake, what about the annoying proportion question as we grow fruits and veggies as big as buffalo heads?

Am I the only one who's been trying to adjust recipe proportions for years, looking at the date the cookbook was published or the recipe was posted on line, and trying to guess the right quantity when the recipe asks for one onion or two tomatoes when you know darn well they're way bigger than the ones used when the recipe was conceived?

Hats off to a food guy like Adam Protter, the chef with a concept behind Canada House Whistler. If you check out his recipe for fèves au sucre (sugar shack beans) in John French's June 27 Pique's Chef's Choice, you'll see he helps out we hapless guess-timators by indicating either two fat garlic cloves or four to five regular ones.

It's more than welcome to quantify those garlic cloves; it's also a nice reminder of the super-size-me culture we're immersed in. Regular cloves; fat cloves. Regular servings; fat servings. Regular humans; fat humans.

Some chefs, like Adam, have been aware of these things for years but, hey, you other food and menu designers! We need more of this proportion and portion/calorie awareness in our recipes and menus. And if you're creating a new recipe or cookbook, how about including weights in recipes, to start, along with the usual measurements, like so many commercial and European recipes do?

As for that worrisome trend the Danes uncovered, I have an explanation, as least a partial one.

As the agriculture industry played with technologies and responded to the "biggest apple on the tree" syndrome we're suckers for, and to our insistence at having every fresh product available all the time, we also lost flavour in our food.

Take the tiniest wild strawberry ripened in the sun, and you barely want to swallow it, it's such a starburst of flavour. Take the huge, industrially grown strawberry picked when it was red in colour but green in ripeness and shipped 3,000 kilometres, and you shovel it down, looking for the next bite for satisfaction before you've stopped chewing.

John Prescott in his interesting book Taste Matters: Why We Like the Foods We Do points out that sensory stimulation is an important component of satiation. Eating food that tastes good has much to do with feeling satisfied.

Ironically, there's a Coca-Cola ad that juxtaposes the Western world's current lifestyle, symbolized by "grandson," who's chronically rushing around, gobbling down his (sometimes junk) food in big portions, vs. the "before" lifestyle as symbolized by "grandpa," who does none of the above. No surprise, they both drink Coke, although it looks like the bottles are both the same size, although I doubt they were, 50 years apart. The take-away: Live like grandpa did: Move more, eat well, take it easy.

I'm not sure how your grandpa lived, but mine didn't take it easy. He was still doing 100 push-ups a day when he was in his 80s. But I can also tell you the dinner plate he used was about a third smaller than a dinner plate today and what was on it was smaller — and tastier. A piece of trout he might have hooked himself; potatoes, beans and strawberries from his own garden, canned in prime time for later use.

The point is, we aren't 148 per cent bigger than our grandparents — yet. But if we keep eating like the Danes proved we are, we soon will be.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who looks for the small pleasures in life.