Over the years I've looked at a few print versions of the Last Supper - some of them bloody awful - and I even have a 3D framed version. But I never thought any of these and a number of others that exist all over the world could, when subjected to careful examination, reveal anything about how our eating habits have changed over a period of a thousand years resulting in the widespread problem of obesity we're having to contend with now - not until I read the following article in the June 2010 issue of the Reader's Digest:
Supersizing the Last Supper
Has the expansion of meal sizes reached biblical proportions?
It's the most widely depicted dinner of all time and now it's the subject of a study by two US academics.Their objective? To discover whether the portion sizes is a recent phenomenon, or part of an older trend. The pair took 52 different versions of the Last Supper painted from 1000 AD to today and analysed the size of the food compared to average head size in the portraits.
According to the duo, eating expert Professor Brian Wansink, and his brother Craig, a professor of religious studies, portions have grown significantly over the past millennium. Overall, they found that the size of the main dish had increase by 69.2% plate size by 65.6% and bread size by 23.1%.
"The last thousand years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food," says Brian Wansink. We think that as art imitates life, these changes have been reflected in paintings of history's most famous dinner." Food for thought indeed.
