Guesstimating portions with real-world objects
Submitted by Merlin on April 21, 2005 - 3:28am.
Typical Portion Control Tips/Guidelines
“Deck of cards, Merlin; deck of cards,” my friend Dennis would always say as we sat down to eat ribeyes the size of kittens.
That terrific, if ignored, heuristic for estimating the desirable 3-ounce portion of beef came back to me this week with all the interest in the USDA’s mypyramid.gov site and the new dietary guidelines.
I’m a big of fan of these kinds of rules of thumb and was pleased to turn up this small collection of real-world portion size guesstimates . Here are a few of my favorites:
- Cooked vegetables – palm of hand
- Grilled Fish – checkbook
- 2 TB butter, etc. – thumb (joint to tip)
- Chopped fruit – tennis ball
- Apple – baseball
- Potato – computer mouse
- Bagel – hockey puck
- Pancake – CD ROM
- Steamed rice – cupcake wrapper
- Cheese – pair of dice
- 1 oz meat – matchbox
- 3 oz meat – bar of soap or deck of cards
- 8 oz meat – thin paperback book
Got any other cool real-world guesstimators?
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i kinda like the tiny...
i kinda like the tiny official portions. when i was little i used to feel really virtuous eating a big orange, because it counted as two fruits.
i’ve met a lot of people whose high school health classes used food guesstimations in reverse, to describe the size of growing fetuses (jellybean –> shrimp –> pear –> watermelon). the shrimp always creeps me out.