Brian Wansink, holds a plate illustrating how food portion size has grown over the centuries, in front of a projection of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper at Cornell University in Ithaca, N. The food in famous paintings of the Last Supper has grown by biblical proportions over the last millennium, researchers report in a medical journal Tuesday, March 23, 2010. The study, by a Cornell University professor and his brother who is a Presbyterian minister and a religious studies professor, showed that the sizes of the portions and plates in the artworks, which were painted over the past millennium, have gradually grown by between 23 and 69 percent. This finding suggests that the phenomenon of serving bigger portions on bigger plates, which pushes people to overeat, has also occurred gradually over the same time period, said Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. The researchers analyzed 52 paintings depicting the Last Supper which were featured in the 2000 book “Last Supper” by Phaidon Press, and used computer-aided design technology to analyze the size of the main meals, or entrees, bread and the plates relative to the average size of the disciples’ heads. The study found that, over the past 1,000 years, the size of the main meal has progressively grown 69 percent; plate size has increased 66 percent and bread size by about 23 percent.

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