When Did We Begin Supersizing Dinner?

March 23, 2010

Every time I venture into the produce departments of large supermarkets, I am stunned by what I see on the shelves. Arranged to perfection on trays and lit by soft lighting are foods I scarcely recognize anymore: grapes the size of a squash ball, naval oranges as big as a child’s head, and pineapples larger than a football. How did we ever get to this, I ask myself, pumping our crops so full of chemicals until they reach Brobdingnagian dimensions? Gulliver would have felt right at home.

All this came to mind this morning, as I read a very clever new historical study that Brian Wansink, a nutritional scientist at Cornell University and the author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More than We Think, and his theologian brother Craig Wansink, just published in the International Journal of Obesity. The two researchers examined 52 images of the Last Supper painted between A.D. 1000 and 1900, and measured the size of the portrayed portions. (They did the later by scanning the food items and plates with computer-aided design technology, then calculating the relative food to human head ratio.)

What they found was a strong trend over time towards supersizing. The entrees grew by a whopping 69%, while the plates themselves expanded by 66%. Even bread loaves swelled by 25%. Could religious practices account for this trend? Craig Wansink, the theologian on the team, says no. “There is no religious reason why the meal got bigger,” Wansink told a BBC reporter. “It may be that meals really did grow, or that people just became more interested in food.”

Brian Wansink’s earlier research strongly suggests that the monster-sized portions we see today in restaurants, fast food joints, and on our own dining room tables have a lot to do with the current obesity epidemic. And there are some simple things we can do to cut the calories. Just switching from a 12-inch to a 10-inch plate, for example, will result in a 22% decrease in the amount of food we eat at dinner.

Above: The Last Supper by Jacopo da Ponte, ca 1546

Below: The Last Supper by Alonso Vazquez n.d.

Heart Attacks, Strokes and the Ancient Egyptians

March 1, 2010

On the weekend, British researchers published an intriguing article in Lancet on a group of people whose cravings for fat-saturated junk food led to arteries packed with plaque. The individuals in question weren’t 21st century Brits fatally fond of crisps, chips and deep-fried Mars bars, however. They were ancient Egyptian priests who had regularly scarfed up left-over cakes and other offerings given by supplicants.

Rosalie David, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester and one of the world’s great experts on Egyptian mummies, headed the team. She and her colleagues examined mummies of Egyptian priests and their family members and discovered to their surprise signs of serious heart disease, including badly clogged and damaged arteries.

Intrigued by this, David studied inscriptions on Egyptian temples describing the rituals that priests performed and the offerings that supplicants left. High on the list of the offerings were cooked geese, whose meat contained up to 60 percent fat, beef, and an assortment of calorie-laden cakes made of animal fat and oil.

Moreover, the inscriptions and other texts revealed how priestly foodies at these temples refused to let all this fat-rich fare go to waste. After performing rituals with their offerings three times daily, they gathered up the leftovers and took them home to their families–hardly a heart-smart diet.

David and her colleagues now suggest that this fat-saturated diet and the arterial diseases that resulted could have cut short the lives of these priests. Studies of the mummies and other human remains suggest that this group did not often live past the age of 50.

It’s not surprising then that Egyptian physicians were well aware of heart disease, as attested to in the section on cardiovascular disorders in the Ebers papyrus. Indeed Bruno Halioua and Bernard Ziskind, the authors of Medicine in the Days of the Pharoahs, marvel at what they call the Egyptians’ “impressive grasp of cardiovascular function.” As the two authors point out, the Ebers papyrus even includes a description of what might well be a heart attack. An individual, notes the papyrus, “who suffers at the entrance to the inside (ib), when he has pains in his arm, his breast, and the side of his stomach (ro-ib)” is in dire straits. “Death is approaching.”

We never think of ancient Egyptians keeling over from heart attacks or strokes. Those are supposed to be modern diseases, but it would appear that there really is nothing new under the sun.

World’s Oldest Surviving Junk Food

February 25, 2010

Quick, who invented the hot dog? Was it the sausage-makers of Frankfurt? The butchers of Vienna ( a city that German-speakers call Wien)? Or was it Charles Feltman, an enterprising German immigrant who ran a pie-wagon in Coney Island in 1867? We’ll never know, but get this. Construction workers have now excavated the world’s oldest known hot dog frozen in ice below one of Feltman’s buildings on Coney Island. Mummified and rather revolting looking, this 140-year old frankfurter is attracting a lot of attention. You can see it for yourself in the CNN video here. The discoverers say they want to preserve it, but they are sure going about it in a weird way–pouring hot water on the ice!

Hot dogs made Feltman a fortune. In his first year of business, the young enterpreneur hawked more than 3864 of them to Coney Island visitors, and he transformed junk food into a small empire of beer gardens, hotels and the like.

Clearly junk food pays. Never underestimate the appetite of the public!

Sweet Tooth: Victorian style

February 14, 2010

For anyone who has been caught empty-handed in terms of a gift for Valentine’s Day, it’s not too late to pop into the kitchen. New York Times columnist Amanda Hesser has resurrected a Victorian recipe for chocolate caramels and given it to two prominent New York chefs to update. The results sound delectable, and the column is well worth a quick read.

Sugar: A Short Bittersweet History

January 14, 2010

Wealthy Europeans of the Renaissance adored dessert time. Indeed their cravings for sweet cakes and marzipan, plum pies and mince tarts far outstripped supplies of the chief ingredient—refined sugar. To keep up with the vast demand and turn fields of sugar cane into bags of white sugar, European mill owners required timber to fuel their boiling vats: by the early 16th century, sugar masters from Italy to Madeira had all but exhausted the most easily accessible forests.

The first Spanish colonists to land in the Caribbean understood this problem perfectly, and when their quest for gold failed in Jamaica, they turned to sugar in 1515 to make their fortunes. In Jamaica’s earliest settlement–Sevilla la Neuva–Francisco Garay, a former slave trader and minor member of the Spanish nobility, imported a sugar master, constructed a large mill to process newly planted sugar cane and forced Jamaica’s indigenous Taino villagers to do all the hard labor.

Simon Fraser University archaeologist Robyn Woodward and her team are now excavating the industrial quarter of Seville la Neuva, uncovering traces of a tragic history that ended in the decimation of the Taino . To read more about this new research, please see my newly posted article on the Smithsonian magazine website.