I’ll Take That Ginorma-sized, Please!
It seems odd to me that we are quite capable (well, most of us) of going to a fantasy flick such as Star Wars or Spiderman, suspending our disbelief for a few hours, and then leaving the theatre without attempting to scale tall buildings. So why can’t we use the same judgement when it comes to marketing gimmicks?
Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten what a proper serving portion of spaghetti/muffin/cereal/salad/hamburger should be. It should not be a surprise that the trend towards obesity and the trend to super-sizing both began about the same time, and now the majority of us couldn’t pick out a standard portion if we tripped over it. Did you realize that a “standard” portion of meat or fish is only four ounces? That’s the size of a bar of soap. And did you remember that a standard muffin size was about the size of a plum, or three ounces! Here’s a shocker: a standard portion of french fries is actually only ten fries and one serving of spaghetti should only be a half-cup; about hockey puck size. This equates to about thirty-two strands.
When was the last time you had any of these portions served to you? The average portion sizes of items such as potatoes, soda pop, pastas, popcorn and even coffee, which, coincidentally, are all lower food-cost items, have generally tripled in the past 20 years. And the food service industry seems to be continuing in this up-hill trend unabated. In trade magazines that we receive here at our catering business, this trend is championed. Of course that is from our profit end; not from the viewpoint of the consumer. It is firmly recognized by the food service industry, that increasing portion size attracts business and increases sales without increasing labour costs. This is a crucial factor, as labour cost is the largest expense in any food service business; not the price of a sack of potatoes or coffee beans. In Canada, the average size of a medium cup of coffee was 10 oz only six years ago, now it is 12. In the US, a medium coke used to be 16 oz, now it is 32 oz, and the trend is moving towards even a 64 oz cup.
It probably hasn’t helped our generation that we grew up with parents of the post-depression and post-war eras. It was practically a deadly sin: Thou shalt not waste food. Our parents quite justly were terrified of wasting food, and we can certainly all remember hours spent at the table until our plate was emptied. And then there was always the “starving children in (insert country name here)” guilt trip. We became a generation of clean-plate robots.
What Mom forgot to tell us, was that we didn’t need to fill our plates with more than we could reasonably eat in the first place. And now, we are a marketer’s dream. More is definitely better; quality be damned! How did we become so spineless?
What can you do to combat this? Well, you could carry out the ultimate threat and never eat out again, but that isn’t likely to happen. And we all have experienced the indignant glare from the pimply teen serving us popcorn at the theatre, while attempting to get a small popcorn which is priced at only 40 cents less than the regular. I now take the regular and dump some into the garbage, because I know that in the heat of the action, I would eat the whole thing. Quite the urban guerrilla, aren’t I!
A more responsible approach would be to ask for lunch portions or even children portions when dining out. If these are not available, have your server wrap up half of your meal before digging in. The clean-plate mentality that we have been shackled to is not an easy one to combat. At home, use smaller plates so that reasonable portions don’t seem even less substantial. This will also prevent family and guests from loading up more that they should eat at one sitting. I have a cousin who is a fitness instructor, and she has always served us small portions on small plates. I used to think that she was a bit stingy, but I now understand how she remains so healthy and fit. Above all, don’t force your children to eat everything on their plates. Always give them a small amount of each dish, and allow seconds only of the nutritious items. Never use dessert as a reward for over-eating!
Just remember that we are in a battle of wits with the same marketing geniuses who have convinced mothers that it is okay to give your children french-fried happy faces as a healthy snack. Surely we are smarter than that!
By the way, those “diet” frozen
dinners that you may have tried once and didn’t think that
there was enough food to feed a mouse...they are pretty
close to what standard portioning should be. Save yourself
some money and start controlling portions yourself. Perhaps
saving and re-using TV dinner trays would help.