Last Supper Jigsaw Puzzle

Has even the Last Supper been supersized? Now researchers are saying the food in famous paintings of the meal has grown by biblical proportions over the last millennium. Does the food in this Last Supper Jigsaw Puzzle look supersized to you? Using a computer, these researchers compared the size of the food to the size of the heads in 52 paintings of Jesus Christ and his disciples at their final meal before his death. What they found it that the size of the main dish grew 69 percent; the size of the plate, 66 percent, and the bread, 23 percent, between the years 1000 and 2000. Why is the food in paintings like this and panoramic jigsaw puzzles portraying the Last Supper being supersized? The Bible says the Last Supper took place on a Passover evening but gives little detail on specific foods besides bread and wine. "There's nothing else mentioned. They don't say there's a fruit cup or carrot cake," though other foods such as fish, eel, lamb and even pork have appeared in paintings through the years. The paintings used in the study were featured in the book "Last Supper," published in 2000 by Phaidon Press. They include perhaps the most famous portrayal of the meal, by Leonardo da Vinci. Computer technology allowed them to scan, rotate and calculate images regardless of their orientation in the paintings. Details are in the April issue of the International Journal of Obesity. Some do not think this is very meaningful science. We have real life examples of the increase in portion size — all you have to do is look at what's being sold at fast-food restaurants. A more contemporary test would be to analyze portion sizes in Super Bowl commercials. That would be a much more meaningful snapshot of how this society's relationship to food has changed.