from the Irish Times
Eating dinner from a bowl is a fundamental error, says one culinary nutrition expert
Charlie
McConalogue, Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, has been on
a crusade to tackle Ireland’s food waste problem, urging restaurants to
serve smaller portions and decrying the use of “doggy bags” for
customers to take home what they are unable to finish. In France and
Spain, the official approach is the opposite – restaurants can be fined
for not providing takeaway containers for diners who request them.
But the food
waste problem isn’t confined to restaurants, indeed many restaurateurs
and chefs would argue that it is not a problem for them: food is too
expensive a commodity for them to waste and still make a profit. It is
in our homes that the greatest amount of food is discarded – almost a
third of Ireland’s food waste mountain of about 750,000 tonnes a year is
generated by private households.
In my kitchen
cupboard, there are large off-white plates and plain white bowls, large
and small, that we eat dinner from every day. The bowls are what we
reach for most often, their shape more suitable for the weekday pastas,
stews, curries and bakes that we eat on rotation at this time of year.
The plates come out when a knife is required rather than optional.
When I am
watching what I eat, I reach for the smaller bowls, but more often than
not I choose the larger ones, trying but not always succeeding, to keep
the portion size the same. It is true that we eat with our eyes first,
before we taste a morsel, and to me food just looks better if not
crowded on to a plate or bowl.
But plate sizes
have gradually increased over the years, and with it our appetites. Many
of us have got used to eating more than we need to, and more than is
recommended by dietitians for a healthy lifestyle. Sarah Keogh, a
dietitian and lecturer in culinary nutrition at Technical University
Dublin (TUC), estimates that the average dinner plate is a number of
inches bigger that it was in the 1960s and 1970s. And if there is space
on the plate, we are to going to be tempted to fill it, aren’t we?
“Average dinner
plate sizes, if you go to buy one today, have gone from roughly an
8-inch diameter (20cm) to a 12-inch diameter (30cm) and beyond,” Keogh
says. “And the problem is, if you go back even 25 years ago, it might
have been an 8-inch plate, but there was a rim and you put the food
within the rim, whereas there are a lot more rimless plates now, but the
plate is still the same size, so people are inclined to fill the
plate.”
The extra and
often unnecessary calories on a large plate serving can mount up
alarmingly. “There is up to an additional 600 calories on a plate, and
dinner should be around 600 calories in total. Even breakfast bowls are
twice the size that they would have been 20 years ago, so you’re having
double the bowl of cornflakes that you did have.”
“I’ve seen this a
lot in clinics with people who are trying to lose weight,” says Keogh,
who is the founder of Eatwell, a nutrition and dietetics consultancy, as
well as having a private practice in Dublin. “The mantra I get from so
many people is, ‘I eat healthy food, I don’t know why I am putting on
weight’. And I say, well let’s look at the size of your plate. There are
many things involved in weight, but one of them is the total amount of
calories you consume in a day. And whether it comes from healthy food or
less healthy food doesn’t matter in terms of weight.”
‘A bowl is always a mistake’
Plate
size apart, I am making a fundamental error in eating my dinner from a
bowl, according to Keogh. “My advice is never eat your dinner out of a
bowl, unless it’s soup, because you can pack up the sides of that bowl
really quite high. A bowl is always a mistake, even for pasta. I’d never
serve pasta in a bowl, always a plate.”
Putting Keogh’s
advice to the test, I weigh and measure my dinner and present it on a
plate, and in a bowl, keeping to the Health Service Executive (HSE)
published recommended portion sizes. The one cup (200ml) of cooked
basmati rice, along with 100g of lemon and coconut dal, looks reasonably
generous on my 28cm plate (which actually dates from around 30 years
ago), but in the bowl – how I would normally serve it – it looks like a
child’s portion in comparison. I also have a plate of steamed broccoli
on the side, and dinner at these quantities leaves me no longer hungry,
but not full either, which is ideal, according to Keogh.
“What is
interesting is your perception around what was in the bowl and what was
on the plate,” Keogh says. “There is some really good research in this
area. For example, if you have a tall slim glass, you will drink less
than if you have a short, fat glass and if you have the same amount of
liquid, you’ll feel like you had less in the short glass than in the
tall glass. At the end of the day, we just don’t need the giant plates.”
Bigger plates and
larger portion sizes are not just confined to home, where we are in
charge of what is served. Keogh believes portion sizes have increased
across the board in recent years. “If you look at the size of doughnuts
and cupcakes and pastries in the last 20 years, they’re nearly three
times the size. When I was little and you got a fairy cake, it was about
the size of the fist of a two-year-old. Whereas today, you’re getting a
cupcake and it’s just huge. We see that growth in portion sizes
everywhere.”
However, Mr
McConalogue’s suggestion that portion sizes in restaurants are far too
large, and are contributing to unnecessary food waste, is contested by
some restaurateurs and chefs. Will Beckett is co-founder and chief
executive of Hawksmoor, the steakhouse chain, with restaurants in the
UK, the US and Dublin. “I think restaurants have done a great job in
working on food waste over the years. Last year we set targets for water
and waste reduction using three years of baseline data to ensure
greater accuracy and dedicated action, and all our food waste is turned
into biogas. If anything, I read more in the press about smaller
portions (shrinkflation) rather than larger. It’s part of the art of
restaurants, isn’t it – getting portion sizes right is about value for
money for customers. In my experience all restaurants hate waste, even
if they’re not sustainability-focused, because it impacts their
profits,” he says.
Wade Murphy, a
chef who owns and runs 1826 Adare in the Co Limerick town with his wife
Elaine, agrees. “Portion control and costing everything within an inch
of its life are vital in order for a restaurant to survive. When we
first opened, we served potatoes as a side dish with every main course
ordered as we thought that’s what people expected. When we saw how much
we were throwing out, we decided to look at it. It costs money to bring
them in, cook them and then dispose of them and it didn’t make sense.
Now each plate is garnished with a potato or a starch and if people want
additional sides, they can order them.”
Grainne O’Keefe,
chef proprietor at Mae restaurant in Ballsbridge, also believes
restaurant portion sizes have not increased in recent years. “In a fine
dining restaurant with a set menu, you are likely to get smaller
portions of food than in a gastropub, but you get a lot more courses,
which overall would likely amount to the same amount of food. It is
important that people don’t leave a meal feeling hungry regardless of
what type of establishment they are dining in, but I don’t think that
portion sizes have had to increase to accommodate that.”
Gareth Mullins,
executive head chef at Anantara The Marker hotel in Dublin 2, says that
guests asking to take away unfinished food happens rarely in his Forbes
Street restaurant, with the occasional exception of very large steaks.
“If someone orders a sharing steak like a T-bone or Tomahawk and doesn’t
finish it, they might ask to bring it home, which of course is not a
problem.” Conversely, smaller portions of steak are proving popular at
his restaurant. “I recently added a 6oz (170g) fillet steak to my à la
carte menu as well as an 8oz (227g), and I am surprised at how well the
6oz is selling and shows some guests are happier with a smaller cut of
meat.”
‘People would complain’
Even
a 170g/6oz steak is still way beyond the 50-75g lean protein
recommended serving size in the HSE guidelines, something O’Keefe takes
issue with. “I don’t think that is realistic. If a restaurant was to
serve even 75g of protein, people would complain.” However, even with
larger portions, and four courses on her set menu dinner, food waste is
not something she encounters in her restaurant. “Very rarely we have
guests asking to bring leftovers home, as there is never really much
left, with the exception of a dessert that they may want to finish
later.”
At Hawksmoor, the
average ordered weight of steak per diner “is probably circa 300g,”
according to Beckett, but not all of it always gets eaten on site. “We
love doggy bags! Everyone should be able to ask for one, and we’ve had
periods of actively pushing them, and putting recipes (like our steak
sandwich) into the bag as well to give people a bit of inspiration. I
suspect very few doggies actually end up eating them, but can confirm
that in the Beckett household Blanca the blind great dane and Bruno the
whippet have had quite a bit of leftover steak through the year.”
