So a couple of friends and I were at one of my favorite Japanese restaurants last week when the question was posed: would we eat more if the table was cleared of the emptied plates? And sure enough, once the table was cleared, I became more hungry and ordered more food. Ok, so it's not exactly a scientific study but check this out - a recent study by researchers at Cornell University arrived at the same conclusions I did! They studied 50 graduate students at a sports bar where an open buffet featured chicken wings during the Super Bowl. Some tables were cleared of left-over bones during the game but others were left untouched.
"The results suggest that people restrict their consumption when evidence of food consumed is available to signal how much food they have eaten," Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and of Applied Economics at Cornell, said in a statement.
In the end, do we really need Cornell University to tell us something that seems so obvious? Photo and article courtesy of Reuters.
By the way, the Japanese place is called "Saizo," located in Sunnyvale, CA. It's an izakaya style restaurant, which is basically tapas style food great with alcohol. Try it, you won't regret it, unless you eat too much.
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