Seth Godin asks How powerful are you?
The answer in Seth’s words… “Very,” based on Cornell professor Brian Wansink, who found that increasing sizes of serving containers for food - increases your intake as much as 74 percent.
No wonder so many businesses stopped supplying food at their events.
Seth’s conclusion… “We still misunderestimate how irrational people are. Even students who had just been taught the facts in the paragraph above ate more than 50% more Chex mix when it was served from a bigger bowl.”
I was interested in what was going on in the brain that would cause people to eat more when the dish is bigger. Seems to me that it is a relevancy issue. How many meals have you had the same look on a dinner plate. The foods cover about two-thirds of the average sized plate. As the sizes creep up, the proportionate sizes, stay the same – the familiar look of a two inch edge around the plate stays the same.
It’s just that as sizes grow it takes more food to fill the center – a fact not processed in a person’s spatial intelligence. Maybe we should move from plates to bowls for dinner until we train our brain to watch for the plate size differences. …melt me a roast please.
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