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Portions are enormous! Example: Chipotle, a super popular fast food restaurant, average food is like 1300kcal. It's huge and enough food for at least 3 average

Portions are enormous! Example: Chipotle, a super popular fast food restaurant, average food is like 1300kcal. It's huge and enough food for at least 3 average sized meals in Tokyo. And that's not including the giant soda most people buy. Go into any supermarket in the USA and you'll see collections of giant cookies. They are easily 4x larger than cookies from the 1950s (or for that matter 2x/3x larger than cookies in many other countries) and they come in packs of 20+, each cookie is at least 400 kcals and people easily eat half the box at a time. Chips come in giant bags. The average bag of chips in Japan is ~65g. The average bag of chips in the USA is 280g!!! Cold Stone Creamery (an Ice Cream chain), you can see how big a single portion is in their front page image https://www.coldstonecreamery.com/assets/webp/slides/2021/banner.webp https://www.coldstonecreamery.com/assets/webp/slides/2021/ba... It's also at least 3x the portion I'd get in many parts of the world. Those types portions have been arounds so long that now pretty much all of the USA takes them for granted. Anything smaller is considered a rip off. The culture is high volume, low price = best. It's crazy to see all the giant obese people all over the place. Except maybe in SF/NYC, restaurants that served smaller portions would quickly go out of business.

rsj_hn 5y ago
This is because labor is much more expensive than food. So the cost of a $15 meal is maybe $5 food. If you make the meal 20% larger and charge 10% more for it, you do it, since then your costs go up by $1 but your revenue goes by $1.50. That process ends up in huge portions as people think they are getting a 20% more value for 20% more food (which they are) and so you may even sell more of the 20% bigger $16.50 meal. As with anything else, to get smaller meals the food/wage price ratio needs to be larger. Food in America is absurdly cheap compared to most other nations.
- cafard 5y ago
  Upvoted. A friend of mine likes a local deli. The third or fourth time I joined him there, I remarked that the portions seemed sized for people doing hard physical labor all day--digging ditches or working on a loading dock--but that the clientele didn't seem to be laborers. He remarked that with comfort food, the ingredients are the least part of the cost.

rsj_hn 5y ago

This is because labor is much more expensive than food. So the cost of a $15 meal is maybe $5 food. If you make the meal 20% larger and charge 10% more for it, you do it, since then your costs go up by $1 but your revenue goes by $1.50. That process ends up in huge portions as people think they are getting a 20% more value for 20% more food (which they are) and so you may even sell more of the 20% bigger $16.50 meal. As with anything else, to get smaller meals the food/wage price ratio needs to be larger. Food in America is absurdly cheap compared to most other nations.

cafard 5y ago
Upvoted. A friend of mine likes a local deli. The third or fourth time I joined him there, I remarked that the portions seemed sized for people doing hard physical labor all day--digging ditches or working on a loading dock--but that the clientele didn't seem to be laborers. He remarked that with comfort food, the ingredients are the least part of the cost.