Super Size
In the three years M. and I lived together in NYC it was a common experience for her to receive a meal in a restaurant that was significant larger than she was accustomed to from dining in Australia, a reciprocal experience I can attest to following our relocation to Sydney. Science has now confirmed that portion control has become uncontrolled over the last 20 years, making, for example, every sandwich a Stage/Carnegie Deli sandwich (so imagine what’s been happening at those infamously overstuffed venues). O.k., it’s not just an issue of restaurants, but of how we feed ourselves, and the study has shown we load up our plates more than ever before, along with using bigger plates. What’s been even more interesting to me, apropos my role as culture-clash commentator, is that serving size is on the rise here, perceptibly so, since our arrival in 2002. Maybe the fashion in restaurants to use large plates as a presentation palette, a Nouvelle Cuisine innovation, has led to a corresponding rise in diners’ expectations, as the U.S. study suggests. Certainly, an enormous dish with a bit of tenderloin or whatever stacked up and surrounded by decorative squiggles of sauce and sprinkled with chopped chives looks a little lonely, whereas a great slab of t-bone accompanied by a baked potato and some mixed veggies has the satisfying appeal of getting your money’s worth. As much as I appreciate the artistry of making the fish look like it’s leaping off the plate in a spray of julienned green papaya, it also makes eating the thing into a planned campaign of deconstruction, and I’m just not that post-modern. Presentation used to be a sprig of parsley, now chefs appear to be applying skills learned from a post-graduate fine arts degree, and menu prices have increased accordingly. Maybe this is why I like Italian restaurants so much: by-and-large, this is a cuisine well past trickery, although Domino’s keeps trying with pizzas.

So childhood obesity is on the rise here, and everybody’s looking for answers, whether it’s governmental regulation of fast food advertising on television or better labelling of packaged foods in the supermarket (or, in the case of the incumbent government, doing nothing and letting the market work itself out, such as we’ve seen in McDonald’s, where the wrappers come pre-printed with nutritional statistics and the walls are plastered with disinformation campaign posters and nobody reads either of them, but ”Make Up Your Own Mind”™).

I once heard it said that the Keen’s mustard empire made their fortune on the smears people left on their plates, and I understand the economics of that. Nevertheless, we could always leave a little on our plates, take less from the salad bar or buffet, and think before we cook. That could work, too.