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Food and drink

The case of the shrinking drumstick: Why we eat more than we think we do

There it sat, nestled next to the mounds of roasted yams and brilliant yellow hot corn salad, an icon of a drumstick fit for a food stylist — plump and juicy, roasted golden brown and dotted with thyme. Mouth-wateringly perfect in all regards with one exception — it was so size-challenged it looked like a mad scientist had taken it and shrunk it to feed an elf.

I’ve always assumed that industrial food production principles — produce more and produce ’em faster — have resulted in things like drumsticks that are way smaller than they were when I was a kid. But this drumstick on display was from an organic, locally raised chicken.

That plus the fact that I’ve been reading Brian Wansink’s book, Mindless Eating , made me jump. Maybe the size issue was just a matter of relativity: The chicken drumstick only seemed smaller because it was sitting next to way bigger servings of yams and corn than I’d have on my plate when I was a young ’un — a mouse of a drumstick sitting next to a dump truck load of potatoes and corn.

That kind of relativity is what Wansink’s book is all about. The cover features a dinner plate with a pitchfork and shovel beside it, where one might expect a fork and spoon, and the subtitle “Why We Eat More Than We Think”, a phrase that could kick off a sequel to the punctuation consciousness-raising Eats, Shoots & Leaves. (I think what Wansink really means is why we eat more than we think we do. But maybe he really was riffing on the notion that we eat more than we think.)

As professor of marketing and nutritional science at Cornell University, Wansink and his colleagues have done some pretty interesting research into the phenomena of cravings, obesity and diet. It all comes down to the somewhat un-Buddhist-like practice of unmindful eating — eating without realizing what we are eating, how much we are eating, and why we are eating what we are.

One of their more intriguing experiments centred around visual cues to signal we are full. Did your mom or dad always tell you you couldn’t go outside and play until you “cleaned up your plate”? Do you still find yourself eating and eating until every last morsel of precious food is gone, even though you really felt full a few bites ago? Then this experiment was aimed at you.

Wansink and his colleagues wanted to test the premise that we humans eat the volume we want, not the calories we need. As a subtext to this, remember that the food industry knows that the two cheapest ingredients you can add to a commercial product are water and air. Remember that the next time you heft a big carton of Brand X ice cream and compare it to a smaller sized one like Haagen-Dazs.

Wansink and company had already determined that more than 80 per cent of students in a previous study said they used visual references to determine when they would stop eating a bowl of soup. The most common reason cited was when it was empty. Only 19 per cent said they would stop eating when they were full.

But what happens if the bowl never empties?

In an experiment that appeals to the 15-year-old in each of us, Wansink and his test team drilled a hole in the middle of a table that could seat six people. Six bowls and place settings were placed on the table. The bowls looked identical, but, after several trials and errors, four soup bowls were successfully rigged up with special holes in the bottom that couldn’t be detected if you touched them with a spoon.

From these holes, tubes were run under the table and across to six-quart vats of soup hidden nearby. The laws of gravity being what they are, no matter how much soup the person ate, the bowl never emptied.

The subjects were told they were part of a test and were asked not to touch their soup bowls so they wouldn’t disturb the “equilibrium” of the experiment. In fact, they were asked not to touch them after someone in one of the test groups lifted his bowl to drink from it “Viking-style” causing the tube full of tomato soup to writhe up from beneath the table like a coral snake. This made the woman sitting next to him shriek in horror. The guy across the table got up so fast he knocked over his chair in his get-away.

Other than those frightened souls, of the 62 others who took part, only two discovered the tubes and bottomless bowls. As for the rest of them, those eating from the regular soup bowls consumed about nine ounces of soup, or less than the contents of a Campbell’s soup can before you add the water.

As for those eating from the bottomless bowls, they ate and ate — some of them consuming more than a quart. Others didn’t stop until Wansink and his crew stopped them.

When asked how the soup was, one fellow commented that he thought it was pretty tasty and pretty filling. No wonder — he had eaten three times more than the person sitting next to him.

Wanksink has done dozens of other experiments involving amounts of food consumed relative to visual and/or other cues.

Students ate 53 per cent more when they served themselves snacks from gallon bowls, as opposed to serving bowls half that size.

When people estimate the “right” serving size it all depends on what size they are given. If they’re given a two-ounce candy bar, they think two ounces is the right serving size; if they’re given a four-ounce candy bar they think four ounces is just right.

To top it off, this eating more than we think seems to be something we learn. For instance, when three-year-olds were given small, medium and large-sized portions of macaroni and cheese, they all ate relatively the same amount no matter what the portion size was, stopping when they felt full. However, when five-year-olds and adults took part in the same experiment, they ate 26 per cent more when given bigger servings.

So what about that dwarf chicken leg I had for dinner? Well, today I had its mate for lunch, served on a salad plate, instead of a dinner plate, with a couple of slices of tomato and cucumber, and guess what? It looked l-a-r-g-e. Well, maybe not exactly large, but it didn’t seem small.

Okay, so I’ve been reading this book, and it was, well, adequate, and honestly, I don’t feel hungry.

But maybe that had something to do with the four cookies and the nice big peach I’ve had since then.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer with a conveyor belt rigged up beside her plate.