Coming from Europe & Asia, the amount of crap fed in America is just crazy: like “is that for ONE person?” (more like an entire table of 4) since what is considered “normal” is just beyond what my stomach can handle, whenever I see their portion sizes: it makes me puke. (No wonder why they have a higher rate of obesity…)
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From the 50s to the 90s, the US was in a massive wealth and growth cycle, and people demanded value for their money because the consumers had the power.
That value was provided by large portion sizes for low cost, which normalized the idea of eating a large amount of food for every meal.
Now we’re just sick and obese and used to it even though the nutritional quality of the food has dramatically plummeted.
No wonder why they have a higher rate of obesity
To be fair, this isn’t just about portion sizes, it’s about what’s in those portions. We have a ton of heavily processed, wildly unhealthy food options, and they’re all the budget friendly ones. Getting things like fresh fruits and vegetables is much more expensive than it should be, so we have this weird situation where it’s possible for someone to be both food insecure and also overweight, just because the food they do get is so unhealthy and fattening.
to add to this is the same good old fashion capitalist based enshitification that makes best-buy dates so wasteful.
in short: they feel that they can out do the competition if they give larger portions than the others.
There is, I think, a few things that contribute here.
- The US has a very stupid “bigger is better” mentality. So if you go out you expect a large portion because that translates to better (and more value). This is of course not true, but culturally it’s very embedded.
- almost everyone I know takes home some portion of their meal from a restaurant. So that single portion is really two, or maybe three.
- IME people don’t usually have giant portions at home, they sometimes do of course, but things tend to be more sane for home cooked meals for your family. They also tend to be a lot more balanced, with more veg and grain.
- what you see on TV is often sensationalized, and not fully indicative of normal here.
The anount of people I see wasting food from these giant plates is equal to the number that are obese and finish the whole plate. Both of those are higher by an order of magnitude vs the people who share a plate or bring leftovers home. Before we had kids, my wife and I could usually share a meal and still have leftovers.
A restaurant would rather sell you a $14 half pound burger than a $7 quarter pound burger. The only fry option is a plateful for $6. Or you can upgrade to a side salad for $3 more.
I don’t think there’s a single objective answer.
The gist would be that it’s habitual due to long term cultural patterns, the same as what any given culture has in regards to food.
At some point, the concept of big piles of food being the default crept in. I suspect that it originated between feast/celebration foods and the “working man’s meal” where early workers in agriculture and industry needed a shit ton of calories to keep doing their work. Once enough people see that kind of portions often enough, the mind decides that must be what everyone is supposed to get on their plate.
Then, as things like machinery and eventually robots removed more and more of the physical labor from jobs, sizes never went back down because the outcome of eating beyond what you need isn’t immediate and obvious. So you follow the defaults, do what you have seen and internalized as the norm.
But there are still plenty of jobs where loads of calories are necessary to get through a shift. So people still see that, and thus expect it on their plate even if it isn’t a healthy amount for the job they have.
TV just follows society most of the time, so a show will most often mirror a norm without any effort to correct for what’s best for individuals.
When it comes to restaurants, there’s an extra later though. Even if people know they don’t need that much, there’s an expectation that if you pay for a given order, you’ll get the same amount as anyone else that orders it. So restaurants have to scale to what at least a decent sized segment of the population expects to see. They won’t be happy if they get less return on their plate compared to another diner, despite that other diner being on a road crew busting their ass laying pavement in the sun all day and needing more.
If a restaurant either changed sizes per customer needs, or charged an extra amount for people with higher needs, they’d go out of business fast
