Why Are We Still Serving Everyone the Same Portion?

Why Are We Still Serving Everyone the Same Portion?

I was watching my husband make a sandwich the other day. Ham, cheese, mustard, mayo, pickles, four slices of bread, crisps on the side. Nothing remarkable about it. Except I found myself thinking, if I ate that I'd feel awful for the rest of the afternoon, then I thought, but I used to. Not that exact sandwich, but that amount. Whatever everyone else was having, I'd have the same.

Fish and chips if everyone was having fish and chips. Dessert if dessert was happening. Second helpings because, well, that's just what you did.

I don't remember ever deciding that everybody should eat the same amount. It was just how meals seemed to work. If we ordered takeaway, everybody got a similar-sized meal. If we went out for lunch, everybody got a plate. If I made dinner, everybody got served up. Nobody ever sat me down and explained this. It was just one of those invisible rules that seem to exist around food.

Which is odd when you think about it, because we don't do that with anything else. Nobody in my house wears the same size shoes. Nobody expects a friend who plays rugby and my niece to need the same size jumper. But food? Somehow food gets treated like one size fits all.

And it really doesn't. A teenager, a builder, someone who sits at a desk, a woman in her fifties, someone on medication that affects their appetite — they can all be at the same table and need completely different things. That's not a particularly unusual household. In fact, I'd guess most families look something like that.

I've thought about this a lot more the last few years. Some days I'm genuinely hungry. Other days a full portion is just too much and I end up eating past the point of comfortable because it's there, or because everyone else is, or because I cooked it and it seemed wasteful not to. Some meals I'm really looking forward to. Others could easily become tomorrow's lunch or a special treat for my dogs — they would be ecstatic. They are not at all fussy.

The thing is, the cooking was never really the problem. I could figure out what to make. The bit I kept getting stuck on was how to make one meal work for different people with different appetites without essentially running a restaurant out of my kitchen every evening. Because that's exhausting and nobody has time for that.

So I started thinking differently about it. Not so much about recipes. More about portions, extras and the bits on the side. Small adjustments that mean one base dish can go a few different ways depending on who's eating and how hungry they are.

I've never liked diet food. The moment a meal feels like punishment, I'm already looking for an excuse not to eat it. And the best part of this way of thinking was that it meant I didn't have to either eat the same to fit in, or eat differently because I was watching my weight.

This way of thinking eventually became the basis for my Cook Once, Plate Two Ways guide, created for households where everybody seems to need something slightly different from the same meal.

The Size Shift

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