Number of words: 635

It’s like continually dining out with the infamous Pere Gaurier. a wealthy 18th century French land owner with a gargantuan appetite who murdered people for fun by persuading them to feast with him on vast, rich dishes until they died from over-undulgence. Each of le Diable Gourmand’s victims were taken to gorge every evening in the best restaurants in Paris. The maitres d’hotel know perfectly well what Pere Gourier was up to, but legally they could do nothing to stop him. He would even boast of his exploits. When a waiter enquired after a recent dining companion, Gourier replied: ‘I buried him this morning. He was nothing. I got him in less than two months. Gourier’s kill rate averaged one victim a year over an eight-year reign of dinner table terror. The success of his homicidal tactics highlights another of our central problems with food: our bodies simply don’t know when to stop eating. We have instead to rely on external cues, such as how much the other people at our table are putting in their faces. So in our consume-more society, it is all too easy to get swept along with the crowd. Even without the wiles of an evil French epicure to lead us on, we tend to increase or decrease our food intake by more than a fifth to copy what our fellow diners eat, says Professor Brian Wansink, who directs Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab.

Wansink neatly exposed our food-cue problem through his own bit of saucy subterfuge, a trick called the bottomless-soup-bowl experiment. He and his team crafted a bowl that could secretly be replenished through a tube attached to its base and which, like the magical porridge pot, could never be drained. He used it to discover what sort of stimuli would make people cease eating: visual cues or a sensation of fullness. While people using normal soup bowls ate about nine ounces, those spooning from the bottomless bowls consumed on average around 15 ounces. Some ate more than 32 ounces and didn’t stop until told that the 20-minute experiment had ended. When asked to estimate how many calories they had consumed, the bottomless soup-bowlers were convinced that they had eaten the same as people with ordinary soup bowls-on average about 113 calories fewer than they actually had. Other studies have shown that we make more than 200 food decisions a day, many of them determined by rough estimates based on misleading visual clues from the world around us. Bigger plates, larger spoons, deeper packers – as well as food-crazed companions-all make us eat more.

Le Diable Gourmand’s homicidal hospitality continued unabated until he met his match in dining-guest number nine, a man named Ameline, who was said to have hollow legs and who was also the second assistant to the government’s public executioner. For two years the pair fought their pitched battle with knife, fork and tablespoon across the finest tablecloths of Paris. Ameline, knowing that Gourier could not be prosecuted for the deaths, had probably decided to beat him at his own game. He would disappear for two or three days at a time under cover of travelling on public duties, when in fact he was purging his body with castor oil and other laxatives. He never seemed to put on a pound. In frustration, Pere Gourier began to feed him the richest and heaviest dishes known to Gallic cuisine, food that even the diabolic diner had difficulty digesting. The end came one night in the Cadran Bleu, the most expensive restaurant in the city. Ameline was scoffing his 15th sirloin steak when Gourier, struggling one steak behind, turned pale, gasped and slumped forward into his plate, dead. 

Excerpted from pages 61 to 64 of Enough: breaking free from the world of excess by John Naish