Industry Figure Tom Chappell

…well, don’t throw them out. They’re probably nice, and throwing them out will make you sad. But put them where you won’t use them everyday, and go out and get some slightly smaller ones. I guarantee you that this is so powerful that after just a week of eating off of your wonderful new smaller plates and bowls, you’ll be as excited about this as I am.

People are no damn good…at estimating size and portions. They’re subject to all sorts of visual illusions, and two are particularly notable:

1. If you give people larger plates and bowls, they will fill the plates and bowls with 20% to 30% more food, to make the plate look right. And they’ll still eat most of that food, in either case (eating 92% of it, on average).

The thing is, larger plates make food look small. I remember when we got our big plates and bowls several years ago (the classic Fiesta pattern), and thinking to myself, “Wow, those cereal bowls are enormous!” But right away, I started filling the bowls with about as much cereal as they could hold, with room for milk. Any less just didn’t look right.

2. Give people short, wide glasses, and they’ll serve themselves more than if given narrow, tall glasses. We’re just built to give more emphasis to height than to width.

I read about all this in Mindless Eating, and it just sounded so right, particularly in the light of my cereal experience, that I ran out to IKEA and bought inexpensive smaller plates and bowls:

Old Plates: 10 1/2"
New Plates:  9 1/2"

Old Bowls:   6 1/2"
New Bowls: < 5"

Plus, the old bowls’ walls were almost vertical, going staight down, while the new bowls have a more spherical, classic bowl shape. They hold much less than the old bowls.

The effect, back at the house, was immediately apparent.

How about a scoop of ice cream? A nice scoop of ice cream in one of the old bowls just looks sad (I would usually put three scoops in those bowls, though I could imagine someone drawing the line at two), but in one of the new bowls, a single scoop looks like the happy, delicious treat that it is.

Or oatmeal? I always used to make a double serving of oatmeal (and think of that: every morning!), because the bowl just looked wrong, and empty, with only one serving. I can’t even fit a double serving of oatmeal in the new bowls, and the single serving looks terrific in there.

And the plates are working just as splendidly. I’ve gone back to putting a single chicken breast on my plate, (alongside its vegetables, of course), instead of feeling as if it’s not really enough if there aren’t two.

Even when the effects are less pronounced, if all that happens is that I put proportionately less food on the plate, did you know that the 9.5-inch plates only have 80% of the area of the 10.5-inch plates? That’s math, baby! And 20% less food.

And did you know, back in Grandma’s day, dinner plates were smaller, just like the people?

I’m going to have to take pictures to adequately convey this. Coming soon!

Container size really, really implies portion size.