28 March 2010
Okay, this has nothing to do with language or word origins, but it is an example of the pitfalls one can encounter when dipping your toes into areas about which you know little and why having a “Ph.D.” after your name doesn’t necessarily mean that you know what you’re talking about. And it’s about things medieval, which piques my fancy.
Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Applied Economics at Cornell University, and his brother Craig Wansink, a religious studies professor at Virginia Wesleyan College, have written an article on the growing size of food portions in depictions of Christ’s Last Supper over the centuries. Brian Wansink gives a summary in the Atlantic. Evidently, the Wansinks have determined that the relative size of the portions in artistic representations of the Last Supper have grown over the last 2,000 years and this has some sort of relevance to modern rates of obesity.
But Carl S. Pyrdum over at the Got Medieval blog does a fairly effective take down of how the Wansinks’ methodology is utterly wrong headed. The Wansinks really should have consulted someone with a smattering of knowledge of art history.
Update: The Onion puts in its two cents..
(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish)
