Did Paintings Portray Food More Realistically Than Instagram?

People have been depicting wildly lavish foods for a lot longer than Instagram has been around. Learn about the history of what people eat versus what they show in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren vogelbam here. Flick through your Instagram feed
and what do you find? Juicy burgers oozing with cheese,
massive steaks lathered with butter, deep fried candy bars atop
mountains of ice cream? And is that gold leaf towering

(00:22):
bloody Mary's crowned with bacon and corn, dogs and pizza?
And enough already? Who actually eats all this? Even during
a global pandemic? These posts haven't gone away, They've just
been supplemented with banana bread. Is our obsession with hashtag crave?
Where the hashtag food porn? Hashtag noms ever going to end? Well?

(00:42):
If history is any guide, and it is not anytime soon.
A study out of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab
from found that at least since the sixteenth century CE,
western painters have depicted food more luxurious, rare, and in
dull gent than what people of the time actually eight
from day to day. In a press release, co author

(01:06):
Andrew Weiss's logal said, our love affair with visually appealing,
decadent or status foods is nothing new. It was already
well established five hundred years ago. Narrowed down from an
initial group of seven and fifty paintings, the researchers focused
on a hundred forty Western, European and American paintings that
depicted small family meals. The paintings spanned five hundred years

(01:29):
and depicted a grand total of a hundred and four
different types of food. Focusing on a time of change
in European and American cuisines allowed the scientists to look
at a context in which medieval dishes and cooking styles persisted,
but innovative techniques and newly traded ingredients from around the
globe were becoming more well known as the drive for
colonization introduced Europeans to everything from cinnamon to tomatoes. To

(01:55):
analyze the changes over the years, the researchers grouped paintings
into three categories according to year of creation, the era
of European exploration and colonization that is fifteen hundred to
sixteen fifty, the Era of Enlightenment sixteen fifty one to
eighteen fifty, and the industrial slash post industrial era eighteen
fifty one to two thousand. The researchers focused their examination

(02:20):
because most paintings of feasts or banquets are perhaps obviously
hard to square with what's historically known about how people
really ate from day to day, and not that wildly
lavish banquets didn't happen. By the fifteen hundreds, Decorating food
with the aforementioned gold leaf was so pauti in Italy
that authorities in Padua suggested that, in order to preserve

(02:42):
the supply of gold, no more than two courses of
any given feast should be gilded. But that wasn't a
daily thing for most people, and just as nobody today
is getting instagram famous with pictures of their microwave dinners
or plates of box pasta, painters of Yore also avoided
the humdrum of ham or porridge. In fact, the most

(03:05):
frequently eaten foods, which included chicken, eggs, cheese, milk, and squash,
were the most infrequently painted. And here are some other
interesting takeaways from the study. Italian paintings depicted sausages at
more than twice the rate of other countries. More than
half of the paintings from the Netherlands contained lemons, which

(03:25):
is a decidedly nonindigenous fruit imported from the tropics, and
shellfish were most commonly painted in countries with the smallest coastlines,
but its frequency of appearance dropped over time as shellfish
became more prevalent in those areas. Lead author Brian Wansink
said meals involving less than healthy foods aren't a modern craving.

(03:48):
Paintings from what's sometimes called the Renaissance period were loaded
with the foods modern diets. Ward is about salt, sausages, bread,
and more bread. Today's episode was written by Christopher Hasciotis
and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and
lots of other lavish topics, visit how stuff works dot com.

(04:10):
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