EAST AURORA, N.Y. — As you sit around the table this holiday season, look closer at your plates. Their design and function have evolved a lot over the centuries. Those changes are also changing people’s health.
The dinner plate has gotten larger. There are mixed studies on how just how much the size has changed. But a number of dieticians say it is leading to weight gain each year. One dietician writes in a blog post, "In the 1960s dinner plates were about 8.5 to 9-inches in diameter and held about 800 calories; by 2009 plate size had grown to 12-inches with the capacity to hold about 1,900 calories."
Do our busy lives have anything to do with the change in plates?
“So, you know, once upon a time, we would have eaten, leaves,” KC Hysmith, Ph.D, a food scholar, said. "Then there were things called trenchers. The trencher would have been this piece of hard bread that they would have put food on top of.”
Sustainable, but as society evolved, so did our plates.
“We didn't just have a dinner plate, we had a charger, which was the actually that was the bigger plate," Hysmith said. "And then we had plates on top of that, and other plates would get added on the side or around with all the different forks and plates and stuff. So over time, that evolved to be kind of a condensed aesthetic of what we could manage, because we couldn't manage all those bits and pieces every night.”
Society has simplified things since then.
“If we're looking at it purely from a material culture kind of aspect, looking at the plate itself, not the plate, the food on top or anything like that, we can think about the evolution of the dinner plate from its size, its shape, its design, its durability, whether or not can go in the dishwasher,” Hysmith said.
Hysmith adds the size of our rooms, storage and tables have all gotten larger. That means more space for larger plates — not to mention kids' plates, paper plates, whatever you need to get the food on the table.
Perhaps no one understands that more than Roycroft Campus Executive Director Curt Maranto.
“If you look at an original dinner plate and if you look, you can see how sloped the plate is and how small your service area was,” Maranto said. “Here is a slightly more modern plate that was made, and you can see the huge difference in portion sizes.”
They have original Roycroft dishes made by Buffalo China, which date to the 1900s.
“They were all hand-painted, and they were hand-glazed,” Maranto said. “Everything was done right here."
Every plate was different, unlike now. From fruit bowls, to tea cups and platters, you get a glimpse back in time. From size to colors, you see 90 years stacked up.
“Our sense of proportion,” Maranto said. “You know, if we go out to a restaurant, we want our plates to be full and piled high because we get that sense of, value.”
Value is something artisans who have come and gone at the Roycroft Inn have understood since 1905. The building predates Frank Lloyd Wright and is a national historic landmark.
Innkeeper Daniel Garvey says the dining experience, like our plates, is changing, too.
“You know, there is the nouveau riche, where you'll have a big plate with a small entree or a small appetizer or a small bite on it,” Garvey said.
He calls it artistic dining.
“More creative dining, things that people don't have an opportunity to try, things that they wouldn't have at home, that they have the ability to have here,” Garvey said.
Hysmith’s final course is this: Make time to sit down together. She says our busy lives have us forgetting the importance of conversation, and knowing how our food got on the table.
“We're supposed to have these relationships with these things that we have to use every single day, and sometimes multiple times a day. Right? And, the further we get away from that, the less we have this really healthy relationship with our food, and with each other.”
If you are interested in learning more about your dinner plate, and the history of food in general, Hysmith has a list of books and places to go to get your fill of knowledge:
- "We Will Feast" by Kendall Vanderslice
- "Something from the Oven" by Laura Shapiro
- "Eating Right in America" by Charlotte Biltekoff
- "How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture" by Jennifer Jensen Wallach