Give us this day our daily bread…only bigger

by Andrew Whittaker
April 8th, 2010

We’ve got a rough idea of how the conversation went at the Last Supper, much of it shaped by the cryptic statements of Jesus; words whose meaning the 12 apostles would only understand a few days later – ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ being the most famous, uttered as they broke bread.

‘Can I super-size my fish?’ probably wasn’t among the chitchat, but it seems the great artists of the last thousand years have subconsciously enlarged the portions dealt to Jesus’ faithful few.

Obesity experts at Cornell University arrived at this conclusion after studying 52 paintings of the last supper completed over the last millennium. The size of the main dish has grown by 69 percent, and plate size has inflated by a similar proportion. In the course of 1,000 years the loaves of bread have gained some 23 percent in size.

It is, as the ‘experts’ assess, a case of art imitating life. Food has become more abundant and affordable over the last millennium and artists including Da Vinci, El Greco, Rubens and Tintoretto (that’s his version of the last supper pictured above) have subconsciously recorded these developments. The changing meal size also notes a cultural shift – as it becomes more accessible, food becomes as much about enjoyment as subsistence.

The most interesting conclusion suggested by the discoveries at Cornell is that, despite all the bluster about fat kids and greed, we’ve been super-sizing our food for hundreds of years. Perhaps the biggest difference about modern life is that we’re not doing enough graft or exercise to shift the added calories. Who at the last supper, for example, spent the rest of their evening grazing on kettle chips in front of Masterchef?