Elizabeth Karmel has some thoughts on barbecue:
Restaurateurs don’t necessarily want you to eat the whole thing; they are giving us what we’ve asked for. Americans don’t like restaurants that serve small portions. Whether they eat it all or should eat it all is another matter; consumers vote with their dollars and like it or not, American consumers love and buy big portions.
I’ve discussed this before, but the reason that restaurants serve so much food is related to the reason that the Space Shuttle (and space launch in general) cost so much. How’s that for a topic segue? It always comes down to marginal cost.
The Space Shuttle is expensive per flight, because they have to support all of the overhead in Houston and the Cape, but fly very few times. But the marginal cost (the cost of flying the next Shuttle flight, given that you’re already flying) is probably about a hundred fifty million or so (the cost of the expended hardware, basically, and specific crew training) which is much less than that average cost (typically well over half a billion). Same thing applies to the space station. Back in the nineties (before Freedom became ISS) they were trying to cut five billion dollars out of the projected thirty-billion dollar development budget. Joe Talbot, the man at Langley who was tasked with coming up with a plan to do so, told me (in an exasperated tone), “that’s the cost of the hardware.” In other words, they could cut out the hardware, and only spend twenty-five billion, and have no station at all. Or they could spend a little more money (thirty-five billion instead of thirty billion) and double its size. Being a government program, the budget cutters tend to make more of the former sorts of decisions than the latter ones.
It’s different for a business, even though the economic issues are exactly the same, because they’re driven by actual customers.
Even if a restaurant served you no food at all, if all you did was come in and take up table space and staff time for a certain period of time, they’d still have to charge you quite a bit, because much of the cost of a restaurant meal is overhead to cover costs of rent, utilities, staff salaries, etc. The cost of the food itself (unless it’s a very high-end restaurant, where you’re eating lobster, and filet, and larks-tongue bisque with a truffle reduction) isn’t all that much. They could cut the portions in half, but they wouldn’t be able to cut the price of the meal by half. Conversely (and this is what the market drives, as Elizabeth says), they can double the portions while adding very little to the price. That’s the economics behind “super sizing” soft drinks and fries–you’re simply adding a little sugar and spuds, which are very cheap, to the meal whose overhead has already been covered by the basic order.
And of course, I think that one of the (many) causes of the obesity epidemic in the country is the fact that as we’ve grown wealthier, we go out to eat a lot more. When the portions are large, you’re going to have a tendency to eat it. A lot of us would be better off simply sharing a meal with our dinner companions, but the restaurants discourage this, for obvious reasons–they don’t get enough to cover their overhead costs if everyone does it. When you’re cooking for yourself, you not only have a better idea of the cost of the meal, because you’re using food that you purchased, but it’s also easier to quit eating and just put the leftovers in the fridge, rather than have to ask for a doggie bag and hope that you get it home soon enough.
Bottom line, if you really want to lose weight (and save money) don’t eat out.
[Update]
There’s a good point in comments:
I have these same problems cooking for myself. It’s hard to buy things in quantities for one or two portions. You end up with three or four servings…. (Re: try to cook a real meal for one).
Yeah, that’s another overhead problem. Unless you’re making something fancy where individual items are being created (e.g., home-made ravioli) or labor intensive (peeling/deveining shrimp) it doesn’t take much more effort to cook for two, or four, than for one. The basic overhead of meal preparation is the same. It takes me about half a minute to clean/cut a potato, so adding a couple more for a lot more mashed potatoes, all done in the same mixing bowl, is no big deal, and baking a chicken is baking a chicken, whether for one of four. This is one of the benefits of marriage (or at least cohabiting).
I cook dinner almost every night, but interestingly, I rarely cook breakfast, because it seems like a lot of work, (frying bacon, making coffee, sectioning grapefruit, hashing browns, frying eggs, making/buttering toast, most of which all has to come out about the same time) for not that great a meal. I would never do it just for myself, and with the two of us, I still generally reserve it for weekends.
Another good point, from the same comment:
…the combo of A and B has been sending me to fast food format restaurants. I can pay little and buy by the item (re: any portion size I want). If I only want one chicken taco… I can buy one chicken taco (probably for $1-$2)… If I want two or three, they can do that too…
I’ve been noticing that, too. I’ve never ordered a “meal” at a fast food place, because they don’t have anything I want to drink (I don’t do soft drinks, and don’t like iced tea–in restaurants, if I don’t have beer or wine, I drink water). I generally order a sandwich a la carte, and sometimes a small fry. But I’ve seen that Taco Bell has a lot of individual, reasonably priced items, and other places have “dollar menus” as well, so perhaps they’re also trying to satisfy that end of the market. One of my favorites is Checker’s (around here, anyway, also known as Rally’s in some parts of the country), where they sell a double fish sandwich for a little over two bucks. There are enough customers that they can afford to sell them to those who want them without fully amortizing the overhead, or if they do, at low margin, and it expands their potential customer base.
One other point. It used to be that Mexican restaurants were one of the best ones to have for exactly this reasons. You could charge a low price for a meal with very cheap ingredients (corn meal, ground…meat, rice and beans), but still have great margins. A lot of them have started to get greedy lately, though. You used to be able to find a really cheap, decent hole-in-the-wall Mexican place, but it’s getting harder and harder, at least in my experience. Of course, since moving to south Florida, I don’t have as much variety to choose from as I did in LA.
[Update at 5:20 PM EST]
This is another good point from a commenter:
Cooking for one or two can be done, but it involves cooking for four and freezing for three.
Yup. I’ve made a big pan of lasagna for myself (used to do it a lot in college). Eat some, put some in the fridge, freeze the rest. And this was in the pre-microwave (at least for struggling students) days.
[6 PM update]
One other point, that I should have made in the original post. The things that get supersized (high-glycemic carbs) are not just the cheapest things to add to the meal, they’re the worst things for us to eat, from the standpoint of weight gain, inducement of diabetes and increase in artery risk. And the things that we need more of (proteins) are relatively expensive. The basic economics of food (at least at the current state of technology) militates against a healthy diet. This is also one of the reasons that the “poor” in this country are both overweight and malnourished (scare quotes because “poor” is relative. No one in the US is truly poor, compared to much of the world).
Another example of this is cable TV.
People often complain that there are too many cable channels that they never watch. Wouldn’t it be great if they only paid for the channels they wanted? Then, they could get a discount.
No. Because the cost of delivering anything is about the same as the cost of delivering everything. So, you could exclude certain channels (most TVs can do that). But you won’t get a discount.
“Bottom line, if you really want to lose weight (and save money) don’t eat out.”
But, but… THAT WILL WRECK THE ECONMY!!!
You’ll put all those minimum-wage earning single-parents out of a job!
You’re EVIL for suggesting such a thing!!
Doggie bags are no problem if you do a little planning. When my wife and I go to a restaurant where we’re likely to have leftovers (just about anywhere but a buffet), we carry a small cooler in our car. That way, we’re not in any particular hurry to get home and we have another meal from the leftovers. Seen this way, it makes more sense to buy a bigger restaurant meal so we can get two servings out of it. Some foods are better as leftovers while others don’t warm up too well.
Exactly – my wife and I find we can get two meals each from typical restaurant orders. We hardly ever go to fast food joints, and on the rare occasions we do we split a large order of fries. But in ordinary restaurants, we can usually easily get two meals each from our respective orders.
A: very interesting / good point.
B: I have these same problems cooking for myself. It’s hard to buy things in quantities for one or two portions. You end up with three or four servings…. (Re: try to cook a real meal for one).
C: In some ways… ironically… the combo of A and B has been sending me to fast food format restaurants. I can pay little and buy by the item (re: any portion size I want). If I only want one chicken taco… I can buy one chicken taco (probably for $1-$2)… If I want two or three, they can do that too…
Your last sentence should be cast in bronze since it is absolutely true. My wife and I have been on a well known diet for a year, and we have discovered that it is almost impossible to eat out and stay anywhere near the diet. The only places we have found that are diet friendly are Subway and Applebee’s (special menu section). We were at Chili’s yesterday, and even most of their “Guiltless” entrees represented about 1/2 of my dietary allowance for the day. The other entrees are off the scale! We were able to find a non-Guiltless entree and have it specially prepared (sauce on the side, steamed vegetable) to approach 1/3 of the daily allowance. It is indeed a struggle to eat out on a diet.
OK, so when is someone going to come out with the weight-loss diet based on quick meals for just one? So you just don’t have to think about food more than necessary or eat more than you make? I could write that book, easy.
You alt.spacers put Marxists to shame. You can turn anything into a way to crap on NASA.
The cooler in the car is a great idea! Another thing that’s handy is a few sizes of Ziplox bags. Those big white styro boxes most restaurants have don’t fit all that well in the fridge, and do nothing to keep the food fresh. (And they’re not much good for anything else.) It’s probably a bit tacky to bring your own Ziplox into La Maison Chateaubriand, but it can be easily done outside.
Cooking for one or two can be done, but it involves coooking for four and freezing for three.
A sorta-related question: why don’t they call them “TV dinners” any more?
for the frustrated dieter trying to eat out…
Believe it or not, Cracker Barrel, of all places is not too bad if you pick carefully in constructing a basic blueplate (“country dinner”?)
Green beans are becoming my friend.
You can turn anything into a way to crap on NASA.
Describing the reality of launch costs is “crapping on NASA”?
Sorry, no. It’s simply explaining why launch costs are high.
@speedwell:
May I suggest “Eating Well Serves Two” as a great resource for those who want to cook healthy meals and not eat leftovers for days. My wife and I have been eating out of this book for some time now, and are very happy with the quality of the recipes.
Cooking for one or two can be done, but it involves coooking for four and freezing for three.
My wife and I do most of our cooking on weekends. We’ll prepare most of the food for the week and then only have to warm up what we want to eat for any given evening. It’s nice to be able to eat within minutes of getting home from work with very little effort. Some foods (e.g. adobo and spagetti sauce) get better with a little age.
I cook breakfast on the weekends. It’s a fun challenge to get several items to all be ready at the same time. Over the course of an average week, I probably do half or more of the cooking.
As for diet friendly food, try Korean. The food is terrific. Our favorite Korean restaurant provides 7 or more vegatable side dishes with the dinner entre. It’s worth the trip for those side dishes alone. Chicken Bar-B-Q (dak gui) is terrific low fat food with a lot of flavor. Some of their soups are the best I’ve ever eaten. If you don’t like spicy food, you’d better go elsewhere.
The basic economics of food (at least at the current state of technology) militates against a healthy diet. This is also one of the reasons that the “poor” in this country are both overweight and malnourished (scare quotes because “poor” is relative. No one in the US is truly poor, compared to much of the world).
Healthy food is more expensive than junk food. However, if the poor qualify for food stamps, they most likely can afford to buy quality food. My oldest stepson is a single parent with two young children. He currently gets almost $500 a month in food stamps and WIC benefits. Since that can only be spent on food, that’s actually quite a bit if spent wisely. By way of comparison, my wife and I spend about $200 a month to feed two adults. We eat well – no junk food. That covers all but the 2 or 3 meals a month when we eat out.
Yes, marginal cost is an issue in the restaurant business but the real driver for large portions is customer demand. I’ve owned restaurants in the US and run them in Ireland and England and customer attitudes are very different. In the US large portions are simply required to satisfy the customer. Whereas, in the UK or IRL I frequently had customers complain about the portions being too large (this would be unthinkable here in the US).
Restaurants do have huge fixed costs (dear God do they…), but food costs can’t be ignored either. When you are working with the slim margins that most restaurants do (really, they are slim), cutting portion size would be extremely helpful to the bottom line. The trouble is that outside of high end dining you just cannot get away with serving a sensible amount of food in a US restaurant.
I get taken out from time to time to relatively high end steakhouses and I’m generally unimpressed. You pay 35 bucks for an admittedly decent steak, but then if you want a piece of broccoli on the side or a salad or something that’s another ten bucks. And they don’t steam the damn broccoli enough anyway. So if you ever go to Morton’s or Ruth’s Chris or one of those sorts of places, then expect the full a la carte treatment.
On the other hand, the nicer places in LA at least seem to be in a reverse arms race with respect to portion size. You see fairly small servings arranged with elegance and artistic flair. And often, they’re tasty too.
weight-loss diet based on quick meals for just one?
Besides Jenny Craig, Nutrasystem, Lean Cuisine, those annoying Progresso soup commercials…
Fresh produce is the most expensive part of living alone; if I want a salad that’s not just romaine, it’s cheaper for me to go to a restaurant than to buy multiple fresh vegetables and throw most of them away when they go bad before I can finish.
Re: Mexican restaurants
You should visit San Diego next time you come out to the West coast. I swear… no matter where you are in the county, you’re never more than half a mile from a decent taco shop.
I get taken out from time to time to relatively high end steakhouses and I’m generally unimpressed. You pay 35 bucks for an admittedly decent steak, but then if you want a piece of broccoli on the side or a salad or something that’s another ten bucks. And they don’t steam the damn broccoli enough anyway. So if you ever go to Morton’s or Ruth’s Chris or one of those sorts of places, then expect the full a la carte treatment.
Steak is about the last thing that I will eat in a restaurant. It has to be the worst deal, relative to eating at home, because it’s so expensive in a restaurant, and so easy to cook. Toss on some seasoning, throw it on the grill, turn a few times. We eat steak about once a week, with a good bottle of red, and our cost (for top-quality meat, bought from Costco with me cutting the steaks) is probably a quarter of what we’d pay if we ate it out. To me, the reason to go out to eat is to eat something that I either don’t know how, or have the ingredients, or don’t want to invest the time in cooking myself (i.e., many Asian cuisines).
On the other hand, the nicer places in LA at least seem to be in a reverse arms race with respect to portion size. You see fairly small servings arranged with elegance and artistic flair. And often, they’re tasty too.
High-end gourmet restaurants actually do serve quite healthy meals, in both quantity and quality. If you can afford to eat at them. Just try to avoid the bread…
Only Middle America suffers an obesity epidemic. Oddly enough, and I have seen no explanation for this except my own idea, but Manhattan has very few ‘Metabolic Syndrome X’ fat people (pre-diabetic or diabetic with high blood pressure and an apple-shaped distribution of 20-300 extra pounds). As it turns out, grandma was right: eating pasta makes you fat. Same with “low fat” potato snacks, crackers, and all the sugar and high-fructose corn syrup soda people eat. Why? Because it spikes your blood sugar, which spikes insulin, which prevents your fat cells from releasing fat into the bloodstream. Eventually the system wears out in middle age for those whose diet is based mainly on REFINED carbohydrates. This “epidemic” started EXACTLY at the time that the government came down *hard* on fat in the diet, with it’s “food pyramid” (even the new one which is more like a silly piece-of-pie-chart) says to CUT FAT and EAT MOSTLY CARBOHYDRATES.
The book ‘Good Calories/Bad Calories’ (academic and slow to read) and a popular version of the same info (other than the Atkin’s diet books, I imagine) called ‘Protein Power Lifestyle’ spell out how weight gain is mainly due to the HORMONAL effects of what *TYPE* of food you eat, not how much you eat, because hunger and satiation are regulated as is lowered metabolism and lethargy are, by calorie-restricted diets. In other words, smaller portions a diet does not make.
Here’s another example: a typical new civilian aircraft program is roughly a five year affair, which means that detail design has to be completed in about a year to allow for prototyping, testing and production. But that means the hard-core engineering (design and analysis) has to be completed in a matter of 3 to 6 months to allow for reports, approval, drawings, etc. From what I’ve seen, the result is that there is usually only one design iteration, and the product is just “good enough”.
Instead of this mad rush to finish the job (including the hiring cattle call at the beginning), why the heck don’t the aircraft companies extend the engineering phase for another 3 to 6 months. The cost and schedule increase would be small relative to the overall project, but you would be *doubling* the engineering time, which is by far the biggest source of added value to the product. This would allow for optimization of the design (for cost, performance, maintainability, etc.), and fully working all the bugs *before* going into production. The long-term economic benefits would far outweigh the additional cost of engineering time (lower production cost, higher selling price since the product is better, etc.).
NikFromNYC: Interesting theory. Would that have happened around 1976-’77? Check out this chart: obesity rates for women at all age groups that a sharp turn up at around that time. Something certainly happened.
One of the factors leading up to the supersizing of the American menu was the stagflation of the 70s. Prior to that American portions were substantially smaller, although still generous. But as prices rapidly climbed, and people started to get shell-shocked over the acceleration of the rate of inflation, one of the tricks restaurants used to deflect unhappiness about the price rise was to remove the old, ordinary item from the menu (e.g., “hamburger”) and substitute a “special” dish with a higher price. The easiest and cheapest way to make it “special” (thanks to the economics that Rand describes) was to increase the portion size. After a while the larger sizes just became the new norm.
Two words: doggy bag. Economically, it works out pretty well if you can get two meals out of every dinner out.
If you want to lose weight, start by cutting out the soft drinks entirely. Water and iced tea.
When the meal comes to the table, partition it RIGHT THEN into the part you’re going to eat and the part you’re going to take home. If you can’t avoid temptation get the waiter to bring the to-go boxes and bags immediately. If it’s the kind of place that keeps refilling your bread, chips, etc. then take one serving and have the basket taken away.
And don’t go out to eat with anyone who won’t buy into the program, you don’t need to sit around watching Mr or Ms Creosote (JFGI if necessary) going at it.
Oops, make that “took a sharp turn”.
My experience, living in Manhattan, is that restaurant portion sizes are ideal for anorexic models. Maybe that’s why there are so many thin people in Manhattan. Some of these posts are making me hungry. Reading about healthy diets can make you fat.
As an 81-year-old going on 39, I have turned into the quintessential little old lady who asks for the take-out box. I find I can get 3-4 meals from one serving at a mid-range mid-scale restaurant. I pop the box into the freezer, of course. Do the same thing if you prep a special meal — divide it up & freeze individual portions.
Studies have shown that if portion sizes are too big, most people will wind up eating too much. That’s human nature, a holdover from when food was scarce and we had to overeat whenever possible to tide us over during the lean times. Eating a sensible quantity and leaving the rest, rather than just absently mindingly trying to eat the whole thing, takes considerable consciousness effort, as other people have pointed out.
When cooking for one, canned prepared meals are good. You just need to read the dietary information on the side of the can and not be tempted to buy an extra-large can just because it looks like value for money (buying more food than what’s good for you is never value for money).
NikFromNYC, I originally thought you were a computer shill for some diet book. Having googled your nick, I gather you’re probably a human shill for a diet book or even a human trying to legitimately share knowledge rather than sell a book. Assuming that you fall in this last, sincere category, I found the whole blather about the superior Manhattan culture to be rather annoying. My take is that the main reason you aren’t see fat people, what you call “metabolic Syndrome X”, is because they don’t mix in your social environment. In other words, observer bias.
I’ve learned from watching others diet that when the plateau occurs, the body could use a high calorie shock to continue losing past the plateau point. That’s when you go out to eat. Of course, I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum, trying to go from 160 to 180 and have it wind up in the right places.
I’m with the others who have written of the glories of the doggy bag. I know which restaurants have larger portions and I only go to dinner at those where I can also take home a lunch for the next day. The economics is good too: an $9 dinner becomes a $5 dinner and a $4 lunch.
One reason why a person does not see fat people walking the streets of Manhattan might be the walking.
There was a study recently that talked about how Americans tend to eat until the plate is empty, whereas French people eat until they are full. Thus, when restaurants give us huge plates, even if we aren’t supposed to eat the whole thing, we think back to our mothers lamenting the starving babies in China and how we should clean our plate, and finish the whole thing. We use visual cues, not physical ones.
Has anyone had any experience with the dinner preparation and freeze places?
They provide the food and kitchen, you cook and take home several servings to freeze.
http://www.suppersolutionsinc.com/
http://www.supperclubdenver.com/
When I did accounting for restaurants in a state where servers made $7.35/hour, food made up about 35% of the cost of your meal (to this day I’m always shocked by how low prices are in the $2.75/hour states). The real scam is appetizers and desserts, which add a whole lot to the bill without requiring much time or effort on the part of the restaurant.